Harmon, Leon; Knowlton, Kenneth (Harmon/Knowlton)
«Nude»

Computer-generated «Nude» by Ken Knowlton and Leon Harmon, Bell Laboratories
12ft. long in black and day-glo green. The reclining nude represented the first experiment to scan a photograph into a computer and reconstitute it with a gray scale, using 12 discreet levels of gray, produced by mathematical and electronic symbols. The scanning process established a certain level of gray in a certain area of the photo and replaced it with one of the symbols. This process was used to try to establish the minimum amount of information the human eye needed to resolve an image. The image of Deborah Hay in the nude was photographed by Max Mathews. The original computer output was a photograph and was given to E.E. David, who, when he became President Nixon's science adviser, gave it to the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

(quoted from: http://www.getty.edu/research/tools/special_collections/eat_m16.html)