Tadao “Tad” Takano, the son of Japanese immigrants, was born October 15, 1926 in Yakima, Washington. In April 1942 at the age of 15, Takano and his family along with about 120,000 other Japanese Americans were forcibly relocated from their homes by the U.S. Government after the attack on Pearl Harbor by Imperial Japan. The Takano family was interned at the Pacific International Exposition Ground in Portland, Oregon, a livestock center hastily converted to living quarters to incarcerate approximately 3,700 Japanese Americans. To escape the deplorable living conditions, Takano enlisted with the United States Army in 1943 at the age of 17, and in 1945 was stationed in Italy.

In 1948 after being discharged from the military, Takano enrolled in the Institute of Design in Chicago, founded by László Moholy-Nagy as the New Bauhaus in 1937. He studied there with Harry Callahan, John Walley, Richard Dobby and many others. In 1952, Takano graduated from the Institute of Design with a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Visual Design. From 1952 to 1963, he worked as a graphic designer and typographer for various design studios in Chicago. In 1963, Takano began teaching Communications Design in the undergraduate and graduate programs at the University of Illinois at Chicago’s School of Art and Design. From 1974 to1975, he taught Communications Design and Typography in the School of Design at North Carolina State University in both the undergraduate and graduate programs. In 1976, Tad returned to the University of Illinois at Chicago to resume teaching Communications Design, and where he remained until his retirement in 1996.

Starting in 1980, Takano invented and started using what he called the BIGS robotic machine, a programmable machine which was controlled with an IBM 5160 to create a new type of art, which he named “cybergram.” He produced many works using this machine for the next 11 years, from 1982 to1993, when due to space issues, he was forced to dismantle the BIGS machine.

Takano and his cybergram works of art were featured in many exhibitions through the 1980s and 1990s. Most recently Takano’s cybergrams were shown in the important exhibition The Bauhaus Collection, at the Bauhaus-Archiv Museum für Gestaltung, Berlin, Germany.

Takano influenced thousands of his students over thirty-three years of teaching, and influenced other computer scientists and designers, notably Casey Reas at MIT and John Maeda at the Rhode Island School of Design. His exploratory photography is virtually without precedent. Tad Takano is arguably the founding father of digital image making in the contemporary photography art scene.

Tad Takano passed away on May 22, 2010 in Chicago at the age of 83.