Gerhard von Graevenitz was born in 1934 in Schilde (in the Mark Brandenburg) and studied economics in Frankfurt (Main), which he followed up with an art training at the Munich Academy in 1957–61. Here Graevenitz first came to the fore as editor of the magazine ‘nota’ on the periphery of experimental and concrete poetry, while in 1962 he was one of the founders of the European artist movement ‘Neue Tendenzen’. In 1960 he shifted away from the white monochrome reliefs he had been doing in the late fifties that reflected the spirit of the Zero group, and gravitated towards kinetic objects, as for example 19 schwarze Punkte auf Weiss [19 black dots on white], 1965 . In this period he first encountered the possibilities of computer graphics and started using this technology for his series of geometrically ordered structures. As an adherent of rational aesthetics he ascribed a special role to random chance.