Archive of Author | Jean-Pierre Hébert

About Jean-Pierre Hébert

“Le dessin est beau si la ligne est vivante.” [The drawing is beautiful if the line is alive.] - Jean Cocteau............ I imagine conceptual drawings. Then, instead of delineating them in the traditional sense, that is by hand, I rely on my own software and various devices to produce each piece. By cultivating a diversity of drawing families, I have been able to pioneer and develop a unique style of art at the margin of science—of physics, computing, mathematics, and geometry—as well as of poetry. Blending these disciplines, each work is a visual poem, a metaphor for bringing them together. My process is thus to compose, to choreograph a continuum of drawing and painting using algorithms that I code to serve my purpose. Because my work is freed from the physical restraints inherent in drawing, I experience no limit in size or complexity, no muscle cramps, no fatigue, no visual strain. I can draw hair-thin lines of extraordinary length, include them in networks, or model them in any shape or size I choose. I can subject them to forces, fields, transformations. I can move beyond two dimensions to higher forms of space, and allow chance, time, sound, and all levels of additional information to be part of the work. I enjoy this freedom immensely, and here are some examples of my work from the mid-1970s until the present.

Jean-Pierre Hébert is considered a pioneer in the field of digital art from the mid-1970s on. He has developed his personal computer code into a powerful tool that drives plotters and custom-built devices, pushing the artistic and technical boundaries and creating an original, extensive body of work. Long before modern computer displays allowed one to pre-visualize an idea, Jean-Pierre was imagining and creating amazingly complex pieces, existing only in his mind—and in his code. The only device available to give a visual reality to his abstract, conceptual ideas was a pen plotter, which draws—or plots—slowly on paper as the ink flows from a computer-driven pen. Technology has since evolved, and this has enabled Jean-Pierre’s creativity to embrace printmaking, installations, large digital displays, and artist’s books. The initial obsession with precise line constructions has opened up to chance, motion, light, sound, and text.

The aim of his work remains an expression of quiet beauty and peaceful meditation.

Hébert received the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award and the Siggraph Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement in Digital Art. He co-founded the Algorists in 1995 with Roman Verostko.  Hébert’s work has been exhibited extensively, including recently in Quantum Metaphors at UCLA ArtSci Center, Los Angeles; Technovisual: Art in the Age of Code at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Washington,D.C.; Luminous Flux 2.0 at the Thoma Art Foundation, Santa Fe; All-go-rhythms at the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art, Chicago. His work is also in several museum and institutional collections including the Getty Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, and in the digital art collections of the Block Museum, Chicago, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

http://jeanpierrehebert.com/ 

Articles with Jean-Pierre Hébert

Drawing is just a thought

Jean-Pierre Hébert is considered a pioneer in the field of digital art from the mid-1970s on. He has developed his personal computer code into a powerful tool that drives plotters and custom-built devices, pushing the artistic and technical boundaries and creating an original, extensive body of work. Long before modern computer displays allowed one to pre-visualize an idea, Jean-Pierre was imagining and creating amazingly complex pieces, existing only in his mind—and in his code. Hébert produces works on paper, including ink and pencil drawings, etchings and dry points from polymer and copper plates. He also creates sand, water and sound installations, and artist’s books.

The aim of his work remains an expression of quiet beauty and peaceful meditation.

Jean-Pierre Hébert co-founded the Algorists in 1995 with Roman Verostko. Since 2003, he has been artist-in-residence at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he has organized and curated several Algorist group shows. In 2012, he received the ACM Siggraph Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement in Digital Art.