Computer Graphics in Context - CG550

Early Influences and
Significant Early Computer Graphics Artists and Scientists

Muybridge

Horses in Motion

Stop Motion Photographs

Shot with multiple cameras as horse passed over trip wires attached to each camera.Until this time it was thought that all of the horse's feet never left the ground at the same time.

Marey

Running

Chronophotograph

The "photographic gun" was used to capture the linear trajectories of moving objects in a single image.

Marey

Movement

Chronophotograph

.

Balla

Swifts: Paths of Movement + Dynamic Sequences

oil on canvas
38.5" x 47"

Balla

Girl Running

Aluminum, 40 x 40 x 1 1/2"

Marcel Duchamps

Nude Descending a Staircase, No.2

oil on canvas
58" x 35"

Ben Laposky

Oscillation Number Four - Electronic Abstraction

Photograph

"Oscillations" were the first graphics made on an analog computer. For many years, they represented the most advanced acheivements of what was known as computer art. His oscillations are photographs of electronic wave forms displayed on a cathode-ray tube.

Hardware: oscilloscope with sine wave generators

Herbert W Franke

Oszillogramme

Photograph

Franke worked from 1973 - 1997 at the University of Munich, lecturing in computer graphics and computer art. His pioneering electronic abstractions paralleled those of Ben Laposky, leading however to his own personal and varied oeuvre. Franke has also written widely on computer art. His first book Computer Graphics - Computer Art was the earliest comprehensive text on the subject.

John Whitney Sr.

From the Digital Harmony period

From his earliest experiments with the medium of computer graphic systems, John Whitney Sr. has balanced a cutting edge use of technology with a strong sense of artistic control and integerity. Considered by many to be the "father of Computer Graphics", John Whitney, and the entire Whitney family, have successfully linked musical composition with experimental film and computer imaging. Since his recognized works in the first International Experimental Film Competition in Belgium, 1949, to his masterpiece Arabesque in 1975, John Whitney remained a true pioneer until his passing in 1996 at age 78.

siggraph page of john Whitney Jr. quicktime movies

"The compositions at best are intended to point a way toward future developments in the arts. Above all, I want to demonstrate that electronic music and electronic color-in-action combine to make an inseparable whole that is much greater than its parts." -John Whitney Sr.

Larry Cuba

Two Space

frame from film

The heir to John Whitney. Sr.'s abstract film tradition. This entire film consists of white dots moving on a black field. The dots perform a series of rythmicall choreographed movements, accompanied by Javanese music.

Edward E. Zajac

Simulation of a Two-Gyro, Gravity Gradient Attitude Control System

frame from film.

This scientific film, is a study of satellite motion. It is frequently credited with being the first computer animation.

Hardware: IBM 7094 computer, Stromberg-Carlson 4020 microfilm recorder. Software by the artist

Edward Zajec was among the pioneers in the 1960s. His focus has been real-time artworks originating in his paintings, which used repetition and redundancy, then developed with the use of computers from 1968. While his films have some aspirations in common with those of John Whitney Sr., his point of departure is the use of the computer in real time, and a different algorithmic or rule-based approach.

Ivan Sutherland

Sketchpad

Ivan Sutherland using Sketchpad, the first truly interactive computer graphics system. The user of Sketchpad, the precursor of all modern interactive computer graphics systems, was able to draw with a light pen on the computer screen and see the results almost immediately.

A. Michael Noll

Guassian Quadratic

Photograph 11 x 8 1/2.
Copyright 1965 by A. Michael Noll

The Guassian Quadratics series was among the earliest examples of computer generated imagery and the first to have its own copyright. Noll attribites has fascination with this work to its resemblance to the Cubist infrastructure of Picasso's Ma Jolie , one of his favorite paintings at the MOMA.

Picasso

Ma Jolie

Frieder Nake

Matrix Multiplication Series

Plotter drawings: felt tip pen on paper,
each 10 x 10

Frieder Nake is Professor for Information Systems at the University of Bremen, Germany, and has had a long involvement with digital art.

He and fellow pioneers Michael Noll and George Nees organised the seminal computer art exhibition at the Technische Hochschule in Stuttgart, in 1965.

Primarily a mathematician, Nake's plotter prints in 1967, for example, explored the visual expression of matrix multiplications, imagery that has an undeniable artistic intention.

George Nees

Computer Sculpture

Aluminum, 40 x 40 x 1 1/2"

Georg Nees was pupil of Max Bense, the founder of Information Aesthetics. Nees, together with Herbert Franke and Frieder Nake were pioneers of Computer Art in Europe. They arranged the first exhibition of computer art at the Technische Hochschule in Stuttgart, Germany in 1965. "

(Cubic Disarray) 1968-1971

A. Michael Noll

Computer Composition with Lines

Photograph 11 x 8 1/2"

Piet Mondrian

Composition with Lines

Oil on canvas

Leon Harmon and
Kenneth C. Knowlton

Studies in Perception 1

Photograph
28 1/2 x 70 1/2"

[image]

[detail]

Stanley VanDerBeek and
Kenneth C. Knowlton

Poem Field

frame from film

Vera Molnar

Vera Molnar started working with computers ijn 1968. Her work during this period focused on the breakup of repeating units, often expressed as a series of increasingly fractured images.

"The image obtained by a painter using a computer stops being an accumulation of unknown badly defined forms and colours. It becomes instead a pattern of thousands of distinct, intermittent, and quantified points. The position in space, the colourimetric values of these thousands of points, are perfectly defined and numerically accountable. In this way, the painter controls each one of these points. At any moment, the artist is able to modify the value of one or several points, or even the total number of them. As a result, innumerable successive approaches (many sketches, to use the accepted history-of-art term) can be shown on the screen. Proceeding by small steps, the painter is in a position to delicately pinpoint the image of dreams. Without the aid of a computer, it would not possible to materialize quite so faithfully an image that previously existed only in the artist's mind. This may sound paradoxical, but the machine, which is thought to be cold and inhuman, can help to realize what is most subjective, unattainable, and profound in a human being. "