In the digital fever dream of Thomas Bayrle’s work, pixelated pictures twist and bend and resolve into fuzzily warped images. Abstract films and videos pulse with psychedelic patterns. But if Mr. Bayrle’s art seems like the ultimate in early computer design, most of the 115 works in his first major New York retrospective, “Playtime,” at the New Museum, are actually handcrafted. Made over nearly 60 years, Mr. Bayrle’s work instead offers a window into digital thinking or, it could be said, how we got to where we are now.

Consider this anecdote. Rather than taking the usual path through art school, Mr. Bayrle, now 80, started his career in the 1950s as an apprentice in a weaving factory in Germany. Studying pattern making for jacquard looms — the precursors to the computer, with its punch cards for transferring designs onto woven fabric — he also spent countless hours pulling stray threads out of machines so that they would not malfunction. On his days off, he would walk in the countryside. Once he came upon a meadow blooming with dandelions and saw a sea of dots: the world of units and patterns, machines and pixelation merging with nature.