INSIDE / VAN MCELWEE

1986 - Dream and architecture merge in this work. A large mall is extended into an endless tunnel, which is then revealed to be a unit in a honeycomb of similar spaces.

Producer, Director: Van McElwee

Associate Producer: Lynnie McElwee

Editor: Morey Gers

UNDERSTANDING COMPUTERS

I found this book for a dollar in a second hand bookstore this weekend. I was thrilled.
This volume is one of a series that examines various aspects of computer technology and the role computers play in modern life. Computer Images, Understanding Computers, Time-Life Books, Alexandria, Virginia, 1986

Cover: Interlinked toroidal, or dougnut-like, shapes and cut-apart surface that unwraps from one toroid onto the other represent, in effect, a three dimensional space - an image virtually impossible for humans to visualize before the advent of the computer.

Artist Mark Lindquist created this portrait with a computer graphics paint system in much the same way that oils are applied to canvas. The image began as a rough, charcoal-like sketch to which the artist then added color, sparingly at first, but with increasing complexityas the work progressed. "I feel the most fluent, freest, working on the computer,"said Lindquist. "I love the idea of working with light rather than paints."

Melvin Prueitt

David Em

The main challenge presented by Rowes Wharf, a commercial building planned for the waterfront in Boston, was to design a structure that would blend esthetically with the city. Architects, thus spent much of their computer time creating models such as this one - a view of the Wharf with its surfaces filled in, integrated with a wire-fame view of the Boston skyline.

To generate this realistic rendering of the finished wharf, an artist called up a model and designated surfaces, colors, angle of light and point of view.

ELEANOR KENT

Landscape #2, 1986
cibachrome print from Apple lle, dimensions variable

Raspberry, 1983
cibachrome print from Apple lle, dimensions variable

New Suns, 1983
cibachrome print from Apple lle, dimensions variable

Init Hello, 1983
cibachrome print from Apple lle, dimensions variable

Seahorse, 1988
cibachrome print from Apple lle, dimensions variable

FROM HERE I CAME TO PLANET EARTH

LAURENCE M. GARTEL

The birth of Gartel's career as an artist can be pinpointed to 1976 at the Media Study in Buffalo, a center for experimental video. That year represents a watershed in his development as he worked alongside Nam June Paik, the father of video art. At that time, Gartel set his goal to make stills from video - the opposite of what was being done at the center - and the step to the computer screen was swift.
His processes vary but he usually starts with the camera image. Basically he uses a special printer with a built-in scanner, inserts photos into the computer system, merges them, photographs the new multilayered video images, and then enlarges them, sometimes to forty by fifty inches. And that is only the beginning. (...) Every new device means more fun for Laurence.

Laurence M. Gartel: A Cybernetic Romance, 1989

DEAN WINKLER

This episode from the first season of the Video Artist (1983?) featured Tom DeWitt, Vibeke Sorensen and myself (Dean Winkler) discussing two of our pieces, Tempest and Voyage.

Abstract video art created in 1981. Video by Dean Winkler, Tom DeWitt, Vibeke Sorensen and Robert Lund. Music by Tom DeWitt and Vibeke Sorensen.

Abstract video art created in 1986 for Expo '86 in Vancouver, BC. Video by John Sanborn and Dean Winkler. Music by Daniel Lentz.

LARRY CUBA

Larry Cuba is widely recognized as a pioneer in the use of computers in animation art. Producing his first computer animation in 1974, Cuba was at the forefront of the computer-animation artists considered the "second generation" --- those who directly followed the visionaries of the sixties: John Whitney, Sr., Stan Vanderbeek and Lillian Schwartz.

Larry Cuba interviewed by Gene Youngblood, in 1986 (excerpt)
"Someone once asked what I mean by the term "experimental film." What makes them experimental? I said because they’re not previsualized. They're the result of experiments and dialog with the medium. And he said, 'Well, all art is like that, that's what art is." I said all art is like that but all film is not. We're much more used to films being preconceived, both in content and execution. Even many people with whom I share the same intent will listen to a piece of music, come up with images, storyboard them and animate them . So that by the time they get to the production stage the result is almost a foregone conclusion.

That's much less of a dialog than my approach and in that sense it's not as experimental. Also there's the danger that the music is carrying the piece: take away the sound and there's not much left. In my work, the visuals come first. I'm trying to discover what works visually, so I never start with music. That would be starting with a composition that already exists, and composition is the problem. I don't have an image of the final film or even any of the scenes before I start programming. I only have basic structural ideas that come from algebra, or from the nature of the [computer] drawing process, or from the hierarchical structure of the items in the scene and how they will dance---the choreographic movements from a mathematical point of view."

Excerpt of Calculated Movements (1985), 16mm, B/W

In the 1970s the computer graphics for the first Star Wars film (1977) was created by Larry Cuba at the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) (at the time known as the Circle Graphics Habitat) at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

For the rest of the interview:
http://prehysteries.blogspot.com/2008/07/larry-cuba-interviewed-by-gene.html