if (creation && object of art && algorithm && one's own algorithm) {
     include * an algorist *
} elseif (!creation || !object of art || !algorithm || !one's own algorithm) {
     exclude * not an algorist *
}

Herbert W. Franke is a physicist, science fiction writer, artist, curator, author of theoretical books and essays, and speleologist (cave researcher). Of interest in the current context are his contributions to digital art. He started this work in the mid-1950s when he used oscilloscope and camera to generate patterns of groups of continuous lines (“analog” graphics). He first exhibited these in 1956, only a few years after Ben F. Laposky had experimented in a similar way.

Soon after first algorithmicly generated graphics had been exhibited in galleries in Stuttgart and New York (in 1965), Franke became interested in digital technology. He published the first comprehensive history of computer art in 1971 (_Computergrafik_ – Computerkunst. München: Bruckmann, later by Springer Verlag, there also an English translation). Franke has written innumerable essays on computer art and related subjects. He has organized numerous exhibitions, and lectured worldwide on the subject. Since the early 1970s, he has contributed a comprehensive work of digital art. Some of his programs were written in collaboration with others.

Vera Molnar belongs to the famous early computer artists. She started as a simple painter at the age of twelve. Her first subject matter were nymphs and trees. She soon progressed to more geometrical themes. In 1968 she started working with computers. Her work during this period focused on the breakup of repeating units, often expressed as a series of increasingly fractured images. [Source]

Artist's website 

Her current exhibition at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen (French)

Harold Cohen

Harold Cohen is a British artist who has lived in California since 1968. His major interest has always been color. However, for several decades he also concentrated on the representation problem: How little effort in lines does it take to generate an image that people can easily recognize as representing something specific? In the early 1960s, Cohen had already been successful as a painter—convincingly demonstrated by his participation in the Venice Biennale 1966, as one of five representatives of the UK. In 1968 he came into close contact with the computer’s capabilities.

... During the 1970s, he constructed computer-controlled drawing machines. They controlled a “Turtle” moving on the floor. Different from the MIT Turtle Cohen’s device moved by spinning two wheels at different speeds, which resulted in very smooth curves. The Turtle, via a sonar navigation system, even knew where it was on the drawing—a feature necessary to control the device on an area of three by nine meters.

Cohen’s program, now called AARON, made its first public appearances at the Los Angeles County Museum in 1972, and the La Jolla Museum in 1973. For these occasions AARONcontrolled hand-built flatbed plotters. The Turtle first went on display at documenta VI at Kassel, Germany in 1977.

Cohen developed AARON into an enormously powerful and complex rule-based system. In the 1990s, the drawing machines were replaced by painting machines (now in the permanent collection of the Museum of Computing History in Mountainview, CA.). Typical subject matters were portraits of “imagined” people, as well as still-lifes. [Via Compart]

Algorithmic Pen Drawing, 1987

Extracts from a demonstration video