'Procedure for John'

In the Society's magazine, Page, Sutcliffe later wrote: "In the early days of the Computer Arts Society, around 1970, there was talk, as there still is, of algorithms that are simple to define, but the outcome of which defies intuition... One that I thought of then is called Skip and Divide... In its original form it applied to the division of a line segment into an increasing number of sections... In 1973 I wanted to give John Lansdown a graphic to mark our years of collaboration in the Computer Arts Society and so made a 2-dimensional version of Skip and Divide". (Page 63,2007, p.8-10)

In this case the program produced rectangles of varying sizes, where the horizontal and vertical lines intersect. However, Sutcliffe was not completely satisfied that he had created a truly 2-dimensional form. He went on to produce a range of increasingly sophisticated 2- and 3-dimensional representations of the Skip and Divide algorithm.

Alan Sutcliffe was born in 1930, and studied mathematics at Bristol University. He worked for International Computers Limited (ICL) for many years. In the late 1960s he collaborated with Peter Zinovieff and Electronic Music Studios. In 1968 Sutcliffe and Zinovieff won a prize for ZASP, a computer-generated musical composition created on an ICL computer and performed at one of the first electronic music concerts held in Britain. Sutcliffe was also one of the contributors to Cybernetic Serendipity, an exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1968. His multimedia work SPASMO was performed at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, London in February 1969, and computer-generated poems for SPASMO were exhibited at the Tendencies 4 exhibition in Zagreb later the same year.