Drawing with Electricity: Who Really Made the First Oscilloscope Art?

Before artists could readily draw with digital computers, a small group of filmmakers, photographers, engineers, and physicists discovered that an electronic measuring instrument could become an artistic medium. The cathode-ray oscilloscope was designed to make electrical signals visible. By the early 1950s, artists were treating the luminous line on its screen as an image that could be photographed, filmed, colored, multiplied, and transformed.

The conventional history usually begins with Ben F. Laposky, who is often said to have begun making his electronic Oscillons in 1950. The surviving evidence does not support treating that date as established fact.

Instead, the record points in several directions. Experiments at the National Film Board of Canada appear to reach back into the 1940s, although the material is lost. Hy Hirsh left surviving chromogenic abstractions dated circa 1950 and was unquestionably making oscilloscope-based film by 1951. Norman McLaren, Evelyn Lambart, and Chester Beachell publicly presented Around Is Around in 1951. Laposky's electronic abstractions first enter the secure published record in 1952 and were widely exhibited beginning in 1953.

This is therefore not simply a story about who invented a technique. It is also about how one artist came to dominate a history whose surviving evidence points elsewhere.

Why do we care who was first?

Oscilloscope art is an important transitional form in the history of computer art. An oscilloscope was not a computer. It was a laboratory instrument that translated electrical signals into a luminous line on a cathode-ray screen. Once artists began manipulating those signals and photographing the results, a new art form emerged from an electronic system whose behavior could be altered through signals and parameters. Mathematical curves, serial variation, real-time electronic feedback, machine-mediated drawing, and collaboration between artist and technical system would all become familiar characteristics of later computer graphics and generative art. Oscilloscope art was not yet computer art, but it established some of its concepts and aesthetics before artists gained access to digital computers.

Priority therefore matters. Museums, historians, and collectors use the earliest surviving works to determine where a genealogy begins and which artists and objects become foundational. For decades, the accepted story has begun with Laposky and the claim that he started producing electronic abstractions in 1950. Repetition has turned that date into consensus. The evidence examined here suggests that the consensus is wrong. [1, pp. 27–28] [17, p. 60]

How to decide what “first” means

Claims of priority are only as good as the evidence behind them. A retrospective recollection is weaker than a contemporary letter. An art-fair caption is weaker than a dated object, laboratory record, exhibition catalogue, film-stock marking, or contemporary screening program.

For this history, the strongest evidence consists of surviving dated works and contemporary production records, followed by contemporary publications, exhibitions and screenings, institutional provenance, later recollections, and finally subsequent historical or commercial attributions.

Using that standard changes the traditional chronology considerably.

Before 1950: a lost oscillographic prehistory

The biggest surprise in Stefanie Bräuer's research appears before any of the surviving works normally discussed as oscilloscope art. [1, pp. 307–308]

While preparing Around Is Around in December 1950, Norman McLaren wrote to British stereoscopic-film specialist Raymond Spottiswoode that he planned to build the new film from oscillographic material. He reminded Spottiswoode of a color workprint he had made at the National Film Board “five or six years” earlier using the same method, placing the experiment around 1944–45. No such workprint is presently known to survive. [1, pp. 307–308]

Bräuer also identifies a possible related project by NFB animator James Mackay. A production request dated July 2, 1947 describes an Oscillographic Project: a black-and-white assembly of oscillographic patterns intended to be printed through a three-color process. [1, p. 308]

Neither record can establish a surviving artwork or public presentation. But together they show that artistic experiments with oscillographic imagery were already underway at the NFB before 1950.

Hy Hirsh: the earliest surviving artworks

If the question changes from Who experimented first? to What is the earliest surviving artistic object?, Hy Hirsh suddenly becomes central.

Several major museum collections preserve abstract color photographs by Hirsh dated circa 1950. The Princeton University Art Museum records an Untitled chromogenic print on cellulose diacetate as ca. 1950. [2] The J. Paul Getty Museum dates another Ansco Printon chromogenic abstraction to about 1950. [3] The Amon Carter Museum similarly dates its dye-coupler print to ca. 1950. [4] And the Rijksmuseum goes so far as to present Untitled (Abstraction) as 1950. [5]

These datings are significant because they are not dependent on one present-day dealer or collector. Independent museums have accepted approximately the same chronology.

Hirsh was precisely the kind of artist who could have created such works in 1950. He had already accumulated many years of professional camera experience before WWII and was deeply embedded in San Francisco's postwar experimental-film community. Bräuer records that he worked as a museum photographer for the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum and California Palace of the Legion of Honor and was valued within the Art in Cinema community for his technical abilities. [1, pp. 124–128] [6, pp. 1–2]

Jordan Belson remembered Hirsh as the Legion of Honor's staff photographer responsible for documenting exhibitions and individual artworks. More importantly for our purposes, Hirsh had his own darkroom at the museum, was exceptionally skilled with cameras, owned a motion-picture camera, and routinely provided technical help to younger filmmakers. [9, pp. 68–69]

Hirsh therefore possessed the professional photographic infrastructure necessary to turn a fleeting electronic image into a finished photographic object. He was also already part of a culture in which artistic experimentation, science, music, and unusual imaging technologies overlapped. He photographed and worked with filmmakers such as Sidney Peterson, Frank Stauffacher, Harry Smith, and Jordan Belson. [1, pp. 123–128] [6, pp. 2–3]

He improvised lenses, manipulated exposures, constructed equipment, and later built his own optical printer. Bräuer describes him as known locally for both technical knowledge and improvisational ingenuity. [1, pp. 124–128] [6, p. 3]

There is a link between this San Francisco network and one of the engineers most deeply interested in electronic visual music. In March 1949 Art in Cinema organizer Frank Stauffacher, whom Hirsh assisted, was corresponding with Bell Laboratories engineer Ralph K. Potter about the relationship between visual images and sound. This provides a clue about the origin of the oscilloscope Hirsh used around 1950. [10, pp. 195–196] [1, pp. 293–294]

Hirsh's ca. 1950 chromogenic abstractions are therefore the earliest surviving artistic objects presently known that can be connected to the emerging artistic use of electronic oscilloscopy. [2] [3] [4] [5] [6, pp. 3–5]

Divertissement Rococo: when Hirsh's practice becomes indisputable

Hirsh's first independent experimental film makes the record even clearer. His own curriculum vitae dates Divertissement Rococo to 1951, while Bräuer uses 1951–52 to account for its completion and circulation. [1, pp. 390–391] [7]

A 1955 Kinesis film-rental catalogue, preserved in the William Moritz Papers at the Center for Visual Music, describes Divertissement Rococo as an abstract film composed from oscilloscope and other artificially generated moving patterns. It also explains that Hirsh built a special optical printer allowing extensive experimentation with superimposed imagery and color. [1, p. 392] [7]

The film was not a private technical test. It was already circulating in 1952, including a documented screening by the Berkeley Film Society; Dennis Reed's chronology also records its appearance at the Sixth Edinburgh International Film Festival that year. [1, p. 391] [6, p. 23]

Hirsh treated the oscilloscope not as the author of the artwork but as a source of visual material. That distinction separates him sharply from Laposky. Hirsh did considerably more than photograph traces from a screen. He treated them as raw artistic material, transforming them through color filtration, multiple exposure, optical printing and superimposition. He even used the oscilloscope's Z-axis intensity input to turn continuous curves into characteristic dotted and interrupted lines. [1, pp. 392–395] [6, p. 3]

In later films including Eneri and Come Closer in 1953, those electronic forms became increasingly complex and, in Come Closer, stereoscopic. [1, pp. 398–400] [7]

That sustained practice is what gives Hirsh's claim particular weight: the circa-1950 photographs are followed almost immediately by securely documented oscilloscope filmmaking.

Norman McLaren et al.: the first public presentation

If Hirsh has the strongest surviving-object case, Norman McLaren's Around Is Around has the clearest claim to the first securely documented public presentation of electronic oscilloscope imagery as art. [1, pp. 355–369] [11]

The film was commissioned for the 1951 Festival of Britain and shown at London's Telecinema. McLaren directed it, Evelyn Lambart played a substantial role in animation and production, and NFB engineer Chester Beachell developed the electronic oscillographic patterns and apparatus. [11] [1, pp. 355–359]

The documentation is unusually strong. Lambart's calendar records work on the “Stereo Project” beginning in December 1950. By December 18, McLaren was reporting a large variety of successful oscillographic forms, and another production letter records roughly 6,000 feet of oscillograph film already shot and being edited. [1, pp. 367–369]

The purpose of the project was primarily stereoscopic cinema rather than the invention of a new autonomous art medium. Oscillographic lines proved particularly useful because they could be displaced between left- and right-eye images to appear suspended in three-dimensional space. [12, pp. 513–520] [1, pp. 366–369]

That distinction matters. Around Is Around put electronic abstract imagery before a large public audience in 1951, but McLaren did not subsequently make the oscilloscope the center of an independent artistic practice in the way Hirsh and Laposky did.

Mary Ellen Bute: reassessing another early claim

Mary Ellen Bute's engagement with oscillographic imagery reaches further back than anyone else in this story, but two very different technologies are involved.

In 1931–32, while working in Leon Theremin's New York studio, Bute explored oscillographic techniques for producing moving light and proposed the oscillograph as an instrument for kinetic color and form. In January 1932, Theremin demonstrated such a system during one of Bute's lectures. [1, pp. 99–100]

Bräuer's technical reconstruction, however, shows that this was an electro-mechanical string or loop oscillograph in which a vibrating wire and mirror deflected light. It was not the electronic cathode-ray oscilloscope at issue in the early-1950s priority debate. [1, pp. 99–100]

The more consequential question concerns two Bute/Ted Nemeth photographs presented at Art Basel in 2026 as Oscilloscope Test(s), 1950/1951. Those dates have since been repeated in fair coverage. [14]

For purposes of establishing priority, they remain problematic. The Center for Visual Music, which holds the relevant Bute/Nemeth archive, dates a representative image circa 1952. The negatives were found interleaved in a laboratory-order tablet and appear to derive from filmed oscilloscope imagery that later occurs in Abstronic. No currently published primary document securely establishes the commercial 1950/51 dates. [13]

The dating of Abstronic itself has also shifted. Although older filmographies frequently call it a 1952 film, Bräuer dates it 1954–55 on the basis of a surviving Yale workprint carrying a 1954 film-stock marking and a public premiere in 1955. [1, pp. 22–24] [15, pp. 263–266]

Bute therefore belongs unquestionably to the early history of oscillographic art. But the present evidence does not make her purported 1950/51 cathode-ray photographs a stronger priority claim than Hirsh's surviving works.

Ben Laposky: popularizer rather than inventor

Ben Laposky deserves a major position in this history. But not quite the one usually assigned to him.

The often-repeated statement that Laposky began making electronic oscilloscope art in 1950 rests heavily on retrospective accounts. Herbert W. Franke later used the date while incorporating Laposky into a genealogy of computer graphics, and Laposky himself subsequently described his experimentation as having begun “about 1950.” [17, p. 60] [18, p. 340]

Applying the evidentiary standard used elsewhere in this article, that cannot establish priority in the absence of a securely dated 1950 photograph, contemporary letter, notebook, publication, or exhibition record.

Bräuer provides a particularly revealing chronology. The Laposky image published in Scripta Mathematica in 1951 was not electronic at all. It was a mechanical pendulum pattern produced by moving light over photosensitive paper. His electronic oscilloscope abstractions first appear in the journal in 1952. [1, pp. 213–214] [19, p. 132] [20, pp. 305–308]

The next year Laposky published Electronic Abstractions and launched the exhibition for which he became famous. The 1953 catalogue describes fifty photographs made from cathode-ray oscilloscope patterns and documents a substantial museum tour beginning that year. Illinois Institute of Technology, which later reconstructed the exhibition from Laposky's archive, likewise identifies 1953 as his first exhibition. [21, pp. 1, 16] [22]

Most strikingly, the original Sanford Museum gallery notes reproduced in Laposky's own publication explicitly state that he was “not originating the idea” of using oscilloscopes and electronic circuits to create art. They instead argued that he had developed the practice further than anything yet revealed through publication or exhibition. [21, gallery notes]

That contemporary characterization is more persuasive than the later inventor narrative.

Laposky was not working in isolation

The correspondence assembled by Bräuer reinforces the point. In November 1954 Laposky wrote Norman McLaren after learning from Hank Stockert about a film containing moving oscilloscope patterns in 3-D. He asked McLaren for information about Around Is Around and later thanked him for material on stereographic animation, singling out the oscilloscope experiments as especially interesting. [1, pp. 216–218]

This does not make Laposky derivative. It places him within a wider field of artists exploring electronically generated imagery.

What distinguished Laposky was what he did next. He isolated the oscilloscope image and treated the electronic trace itself as the artwork. He photographed individual states, selected and enlarged them, numbered them, named the family Oscillons, explained his techniques, published reproductions, issued catalogues, and circulated exhibitions through museums. [18, pp. 340–347] [21, pp. 1–16]

Laposky may not have been the first oscilloscope artist. He was the artist who made oscilloscope art into a recognizable category. That achievement is substantial enough without attaching an unsupported 1950 priority to it.

An evidence-weighted timeline

c. 1944-45 - Norman McLaren, lost NFB oscillographic workprint. In a December 1950 letter, McLaren recalled making a color workprint from oscillographic material at the National Film Board five or six years earlier. The work itself is not known to survive. [1, pp. 307–308]

1947 - James Mackay, NFB Oscillographic Project. A surviving production request describes black-and-white oscillographic patterns intended for three-color printing. The resulting film material appears to be lost. [1, p. 308]

c. 1950 - Hy Hirsh, abstract chromogenic photographs. Princeton, Getty, Amon Carter, and the Rijksmuseum date surviving Hirsh abstractions to around 1950. These are the earliest surviving artistic objects presently known from the emerging practice of electronic oscilloscope art. [2] [3] [4] [5]

1951 - Norman McLaren, Evelyn Lambart, and Chester Beachell, Around Is Around. Shown at the Festival of Britain, this is the earliest securely documented public presentation of artistic imagery photographed from an electronic oscilloscope. [11] [12, pp. 513–520] [1, pp. 355–369]

1951 - Hy Hirsh, Divertissement Rococo. Hirsh's first independent experimental film incorporates oscilloscope imagery transformed through color, multiple exposure, and optical printing. It was shown internationally by 1952. [1, pp. 390–392] [6, p. 23] [7]

1952 - Ben F. Laposky, electronic abstractions published in Scripta Mathematica. This is the earliest securely dated publication of Laposky's electronic oscilloscope imagery found in the documentary record; his published 1951 image had instead been generated mechanically with a pendulum. [19, p. 132] [20, pp. 305–308]

c. 1952 - Mary Ellen Bute and Ted Nemeth, oscilloscope photographs. Surviving negatives associated with the later Abstronic imagery are currently dated around 1952 by the Center for Visual Music. The commercially circulated 1950/51 dating remains insufficiently documented to establish priority. [13] [14]

1953 - Ben F. Laposky, Electronic Abstractions. Laposky's landmark traveling exhibition presented fifty oscilloscope photographs as autonomous artworks. His own exhibition literature acknowledged that he was not originating the idea; his major contribution was to systematize, name, exhibit, and popularize the medium. [21, pp. 1, 16; gallery notes] [22]

1953 - Hy Hirsh, Eneri and Come Closer. Hirsh expanded his oscilloscope vocabulary through increasingly complex optical processing and, in Come Closer, stereoscopic 3-D. [1, pp. 398–400] [7]

1954-55 - Mary Ellen Bute, Abstronic. Surviving Yale film material carries a 1954 stock marking, and the completed film premiered in 1955. Bute combined electronic oscilloscope imagery with animation, optical effects, color, and music. [1, pp. 22–24] [15, pp. 263–266]

December 1955 - Herbert W. Franke and Franz Raimann, Oscillograms. An analog calculating system was used to mathematically transform signals displayed on a cathode-ray oscillograph, bringing computation directly into the image-generating process. [23] [24]

1959 - Franke, Experimentelle Ästhetik; Hirsh imagery in Vortex V. Franke exhibited computational oscillograms at Vienna's Museum of Applied Arts, while Jordan Belson incorporated Hirsh's oscilloscope footage into immersive projections at San Francisco's Morrison Planetarium. [25] [7]

1961-68 - Alexandre Vitkine, Stephen Beck, and John C. Mott-Smith. Oscilloscope imagery continued into generative photography, electronic video synthesis, and finally computer graphics; by 1968 Mott-Smith was photographing an oscilloscope directly connected to a computer for imagery reproduced in Cybernetic Serendipity. [26] [27] [28]

2013-present - Oscilloscope Music and 0xDEAFBEEF. Jerobeam Fenderson and Hansi3D revived the physical X-Y oscilloscope as a simultaneous sound-and-image instrument, while 0xDEAFBEEF's Synth Poems reconstruct its logic in software and, by 2026, rematerialized it as hand-forged sculpture. [29] [30] [31]

How Laposky became “the pioneer”

If priority is this complicated, why has Laposky so often been placed at the beginning? Because histories are shaped not only by invention but by visibility.

Hirsh primarily worked in experimental film. His photographic work was poorly known for decades, his film materials were dispersed, and he died in 1961. McLaren's oscillographic work belonged to a collaborative institutional project remembered principally for animation and stereoscopy. Bute incorporated electronic imagery into a much broader practice of visual music. [1, pp. 27–30]

Laposky did the opposite. He made the electronic trace the subject. He photographed it repeatedly, numbered the results, invented the memorable term Oscillon, wrote about the technique, supplied reproductions to publications, issued catalogues, and sent touring exhibitions through dozens of institutions. [18, pp. 340–347] [21, pp. 1–16]

Herbert W. Franke subsequently placed Laposky near the beginning of the emerging history of computer graphics. As Bräuer argues, that retrospective framing helped stabilize the historical narrative through which “Laposky, 1950” eventually became conventional wisdom. [17, p. 60] [1, pp. 27–28]

Laposky did not necessarily win the race. He won the archive.

So who made the first oscilloscope art?

The conventional answer - Ben Laposky in 1950 - is no longer convincing. His electronic abstractions are securely documented beginning in 1952, followed by the publication and exhibition campaign that made him synonymous with oscilloscope art from 1953 onward.

Before Laposky, the record becomes more complicated. The National Film Board of Canada has the earliest documentary trail, reaching into the 1940s, although the material itself appears to be lost. McLaren, Lambart, and Beachell's Around Is Around supplies the strongest evidence for a public presentation of electronic oscilloscope imagery in 1951. Bute's engagement with oscillography goes back much further, but the evidence currently available does not securely place her cathode-ray photographs in 1950 or 1951.

Among surviving artworks, Hy Hirsh has the strongest claim to priority. His chromogenic abstractions are consistently dated circa 1950 by major museum collections, and visibly employ the electronic curves characteristic of oscilloscope imagery. By 1951, Divertissement Rococo places that imagery within a sophisticated and unmistakably artistic practice of photography, film, color, optical printing, and superimposition.

There may never be a single document identifying the instant at which an artist first looked at an oscilloscope and decided that its glowing line was art. That is not necessary to correct the historical record. The evidence no longer supports treating Laposky's purported 1950 start as the established beginning of oscilloscope art. On the surviving evidence we have today, Hy Hirsh belongs at the start of the story.