Rare! Mona Lisa Displayed in Computer Histoty Museum, and Museum of Digital Art. Mona by the Numbers by H.Philip Peterson, October 24, 1965

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30.5 inches by 46 inches. Own a piece of history. This rare original work of digital art was created by … Read more 30.5 inches by 46 inches. Own a piece of history. This rare original work of digital art was created by the digital Da Vinci H.Philip Peterson. There are only 2 museums who are in possession of original prints ZKM Center for Art and Media in Germany and Computer History Museum in California.
Produced in 1965 this is one of the earliest examples of computer-aided drawing, produced on a Calcomp 30-inch plotter.Mona by the Numbers is among the earliest artworks created on a general-purpose electronic digital computer. While it served a practical marketing purpose, Mona by the Numbers was also closely associated with the nascent form of computer art. It appeared on the cover of the December 1965 issue of Computers and Automation, home of the annual Computer Art Contest that was first held in 1963, and it was discussed in Herbert W. Franke’s touchstone Computergraphik – Computerkunst (1971). A follow-up piece created by Peterson using the same technique, but applied to a photo of Norbert Wiener, was featured in the landmark Cybernetic Serendipity (1968) exhibition.
Because of the technique of its generation, the Digital Mona Lisa is also known as Mona by Numbers.
H. Philip Peterson of Control Data Corporation (CDC) used a CDC 3200 computer and a scanner (that he called “flying-spot”) to create in 1964 a digital transposition of Leonardo da Vinci’s famous painting, “Mona Lisa” (done in 1503/04). He thus created a digital representation of the analogue original. Peterson’s generative idea was to consider the original painting as a grid of small colored dots (now called “pixels”). The colors were, however, reduced to only grey of various shades. These shades of grey were realized on a Calcomp plotter by using numerical characters, some overprinting others to approximate the grey levels. This production process took 14 hours to complete the image of 100,000 pixels.

Small water damage spot near the top. Check photos please! See less