‘In 1985, I said to myself that if I was an artist of my time, I should explore the technologies of my time.’ A year later, painter Samia Halaby (1936, Jerusalem) acquired a Commodore Amiga 1000 computer, on which she began programming abstract kinetic paintings using the BASIC and C languages. ‘I wanted technology to reveal new formal attributes for the language of images’, she explains. The computer allowed Halaby to think of her images in movement and in relation to sound. Some of her kinetic paintings take inspiration from the urban environment, others are formal variations obtained by repeating and superimposing geometric motifs in a variety of colours. For Halaby, the computer is a means of continuing with the pictorial ideals of the avant-garde of the early twentieth century: ‘The computer, with its flat luminous colour and infinite space and its potential for moving abstract shape without the use of perspective and shading and without a lens, is imminently suitable for the development of the futuristic dreams of the earliest abstract painters. Furthermore, the combination of sound commands with visual commands in one program particularly realises the ambitions of the Futurist painters to represent simultaneously their many impressions of reality.’