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Monique Nahas and Hervé Huitric

Monique Nahas (1940, Paris) and Hervé Huitric (1945, Paris) met at the Centre universitaire de Vincennes, Paris, in 1970. Monique previously studied physics at the École polytechnique; Hervé trained as an artist at the Fine Arts school in Paris and is among the founders of the Groupe Art et Informatique de Vincennes (GAIV, Art and Computer Science Group of Vincennes, founded in 1969), which Monique joined in 1970. From 1971, the artists used a computer to compose paintings and drawings, initially employing the programming languages ALGOL and FORTRAN to determine the distribution of colour on works on paper. Once defined, the different colours were applied manually by the artists, they later explained: ‘We titled the works produced by this technique the Séries continues [ Continuous series]: whatever the colour, its brightness is the same wherever it appears on the surface, in terms of quantity and intensity’, explains Huitric. Later on, they used punched cards as a stencil for paintings, applying the colours with a roller as seen in Cubes (1973) which explores the perception of colours on a three-dimensional form.