Talk at NurtureArt 05/14/11

A little of my background with computers

When I'm learning about an artist, I usually become interested in knowing what influenced them at an early age. So it's in that spirit, along with the fact that the now-burgeoning field of Internet-based artwork can be a tough nut to crack on its own to the uninitiated, that I thought I'd let you know a few things that got me excited about art and computers in particular as a young person.

Growing up, in San Diego California, my first computer at home was my dad's Compaq Portable. At around 30 pounds, it was about as portable as a cinder block, but in the middle of the 80s, it was the image that counted. It had a chic grey canvas case in which it fit when my dad would carry it to and from his office, which was set in a modernist complex of wood paneling, topiary, and eucalyptus trees in a tourist-friendly, palm-lined stretch of frontage road off Highway 8 called the Hotel Circle.

Promotional photo of the Compaq Portable.

Looking into the void of the always mostly-empty screen was like staring into a cave; the forced minimalism of the limited display made a monument of whatever image which happened to appear. And the slow decay of the persisting phosphorescent image after the screen had changed gave those images further visual impact and a near-physical presence; evocative and incredible to see at such a young age, when, as an only child, I was interested in alternatives to the boredom of life in the suburbs.

Screen footage of Compaq Portable playing a demonstration program.

I was drawn to many games on that computer, but one of them which remains most memorable is one called Castle Adventure, a role-playing action-adventure set in a maze of extended ASCII symbols. The King Arthur/dwarf-and-elf subject matter wasn't what interested me -- for all I cared, the game might as well have been set in an office of the DMV -- what captivated me was that this was, if you removed the text, an interactive work of abstraction, with its own internal logic. It was an alternate aesthetic world which spoke to my then-keen interest in escapism and imagination.

Gameplay from Castle Adventure.

My babysitter Keith would constantly use the Compaq whenever he was at my house to play games with names like "Food Fight" on Bulletin Board Systems, the gameplay of which, as far as I could tell, consisted of him and other teenagers swearing at each other, my parents footing the modem bill. One of those BBSes was the likely source of NUDE.BAS, a program I found whose sole purpose was to draw a naked woman in impressive detail using a series of plotted lines, which took half a minute for the machine to accomplish. At the age of 6, it was a real turning point in my aesthetic consciousness. I tracked down the code this week and ran it; here's a video of the results, exactly as I remember them:

Output of NUDE.BAS. Thanks to nullsleep for finding the BASICA interpreter.

Although I couldn't have realized it at the time, NUDE.BAS was, in a sense, probably my first exposure to art on the Internet. It's a romantic and humanistic image when I imagine its creation, the authors of the program, G. Wesley and Dave Moon, a couple of teenage boys (or, for all I know, they might have been grown men), drawing out a pin-up girl on graph paper, plotting out the coordinates, and sending it out to potentially the entire world through the phone lines, all decades before the YouTube/video-chat age would allow us the opportunity to look into each others' living rooms. I took a class on BASIC programming at summer school the next year.

Macintosh and Hypercard

In the early 90s, my elementary school got a set of Macintosh Classics. In contrast to the Compaq with its cavernous display defined by its foreboding negative space, these machines were the front-runners of the new trend of user-friendliness as realized through the Graphical User Interface, which attempted to make the computing environment more relatable via the extensive use of "interface metaphors." These were the charming collection of pixel-drawn file folders, garbage cans, suitcases, watches, stacks of paper, etc., many of them the work of now-legendary interface designer Susan Kare, and many scenes on the Mac were rendered in shades of ordered dithering or patterns of ersatz brick, checkerboard, fishscale and wicker, shown here in a pallette in the SuperPaint program of which my family would later have a copy on our Macintosh LC III.

At the age of ten, I was no Baudrillard by any stretch of the imagination. But I was enough of a dreamer, I guess, to realize there was something poetic to my young mind about this plastic world of substitutes. And when my mind was blown seeing the simulation of the state of death, in the form of a transitional screen in Shadowgate, an installment of the ICOM MacVenture Series of distinctively-illustrated, moody adventure games that my classmates were playing around this time, I knew first-hand that here was something with real evocative potential.

Death scene from Shadowgate by ICOM Simulations. The grim reaper figure that freaked me out big-time in my childhood is likely a combination of MacPaint-style pencil and flood-fill illustration and a scanned image of a skull digitized using Floyd-Steinberg dithering.

Opening scene from Shadowgate. Notice the widely-varying attention to detail; ornamental figures like the skull and ironwork on the door are painstakingly defined (characteristic of the meticulous graphic treatment of many of the small objects in the game), as are the tree silhouettes which frame the scene, while the stone and mortar of the castle wall are outlined and flood-filled with flat patterns that define their tones and contours bluntly by comparison.

A scene from Uninvited, another ICOM game from earlier in the same series. I can't get enough of this weird graphic style: the carpet pattern is a flood-fill of diagonal pinstripes, with no regard for lighting or perspective, but in the meantime look at how the fluted texture of the crown moulding is approximated with a vertical hatch pattern, and an excessively careful placement of diagonal pixels defines the ornaments on the armoire in the back.

Another experience which cemented my interest in, and led to a more participatory involvement with, the Mac platform, was my discovery of HyperCard, a "hypermedia tool" which was packaged with Macintosh computers around that time. The basic premise was user-friendly application design, through the creation of a "stack" of "cards" containing images, sounds, buttons, text, and other media, with the potential for interactivity and hyperlinking cards together through a simple English-based scripting language called HyperTalk.

The first card of HyperCard's Home stack. Each button on this page linked to a corresponding stack, which offered functionalities of varying usefulness, such as dialing the phone via modem, converting data to graphs, Rolodex-style contact management, storing clip art images, etc.

I rarely hear HyperCard referenced today, and Apple has discontinued support of the program since the early 2000s, but I've since learned that HyperCard was formative in popularizing the Internet-related concept of hypertext, and was the chief inspiration for the JavaScript language, the web browser, and HTTP itself.

After messing with Hypercard a while, I asked my parents to buy me the following two books (below), and I read them near-religiously as I worked through various realizations of works in the archetypical geek canon; surreal adventures with a bent toward non-sequitur humor, algorithmic drawing demos, subversive simulations of the Finder, etc.

Look at those two on the right. Think they rented those tuxes just for the cover shoot?

A short TV feature from 1990 covering various uses of Hypercard 2.0.

Two awesome games

It's worth mentioning the blockbuster gaming hit Myst, not just because of its impact on me among thousands of other young people at the time (it was the top-selling computer game for almost a decade after its release in 1993), but also because it's a good segue; The graphics were made with 3D software, but the interactive game itself was created using HyperCard. Imagine my encouragement when I found that out and took a look at the code for myself, since I admired the creators of the game for their ability to evoke a mood and tell a story with very few words or human characters; it was another self-contained work of imagination.

Another game which was hugely influential to me, albeit for mostly different reasons, was Jordan Mechner's solo effort Prince of Persia. The story of Mechner's use of the rotoscope animation technique, using film footage of his brother running around outside as source material for the animation cycles of the hero character, speaks for itself in describing the care he took to depict convincing and relatable motion in his game. From beginning to end, the formal conceit is the simulation of a silent film, as shown by the title cards and wordless cinematic sequences in the opening, which blends almost seamlessly into the gameplay. It gave the impression that every second of the game was part of a film, the tone of which, depending on one's playing style, might range anywhere from a swashbuckling heroism to a lonely, introspective character study. The takeaway for me was the possibility for gameplay (or use of an interactive interface in general) to be viewed as a form of performance, a concept I would later learn was more familiar to the language of new media.

Opening sequence and gameplay from Prince of Persia. Favorite details of mine include the simulated twinkling stars and flaming torches, and the ham-fistedly dramatic pantomime scene between Jaffar and the princess.

Video synthesists and early computer art

Early on at Bard College I started learning more about the early video synthesists, many of whom spoke to my interests in the evocative power of abstract synthetic imagery and kitsch. People like John Whitney and Oskar Fischinger interested me from the more utopian standpoint of so-called "visual music" and synaesthetic connections between media, while the immediacy and impact of Stephen Beck's projects using his Direct Video Synthesizer, the Vasulkas and Paik's image distortions, and Harry Smith's filmic depictions of phosphenes and hypnagogia captured my interest with their more shamanic approaches.

Stephen Beck looking like an excellent freak at his console.

Dan Sandin evidently on safari in his lab.

Some footage from the Early Abstractions collection by Harry Smith.

Bell Labs and the "naive professional"

As I was getting more acquainted with avant-garde and electronic music of the twentieth century, reading about influential figures like Max Mathews, I started exploring the computer/sound/visual crossover projects that had come from Bell Laboratories in the 60s. And as I started working with using sound signals to control oscilloscopes, I started to explore the history of early computer artists like Ben Laposky, Manfred Mohr, Edward Zajec, and Lillian Schwartz, who had pioneered techniques similar to the ones I was using. One of them is shown below, a synthetic randomly-generated choreography of dance movement. This clip illustrates what is, for me, one of the more interesting issues in the field of art and technology: the relationship between the intention and actual results of aesthetic expression within technological constraints.

Computer-generated ballet sequence by Michael Noll of Bell Labs.

The effect is something I see often in early computer art using highly simplified systems, and it's somewhat related to, but in some ways opposite of, Cory Arcangel's concept of "dirt style," which I understand as the unintentional aesthetic artifacts born from untrained uses of creative technology.

It's true, there seem to be unintentional aesthetic side-effects in this piece, which (I can only assume) attempts to be a somewhat standardized or simplified symbolic depiction of dancers on stage, but in actuality gives me the impression of some type of military-tactical diagram, which one might consider an unwitting piece of dirt style. But instead of a "misuse" of a creative framework which can be "correctly" expressive when used according to its conventions, in this case it's really the framework which doesn't "adequately" permit expressive content in the first place, and professional or trained use of it is destined to result in this type of confusion. So where dirt style is the result of aesthetically limited uses of professional tools, this is more like professional, institutional, or even automated (in other words confident) uses of tools which are themselves limited.

This idea of "naive professional" uses of creative tools (in other words, attempting to competently use a simplistic tool, rather than taking the more post-modern approach of subverting its intended use) is one that I often try to explore through attempting to create intentionally limited systems in which to work expressively.

A few paintings

I tried to keep myself confined to computers and technology, but I have to mention, at least, the paintings of the French Surrealist Yves Tanguy because it ties in so well with the start of this page. I was introduced to his work early in college and it made a lasting impression since it seemed to go right past abstraction and into pure form while still keeping enough complexity and variation to stay interesting; his non-representational hyper-realist style of painting detailed portraits of otherworldly objects captured my imagination and appealed to that same soft spot, my young affinity for individualistic expression, that Castle Adventure had when I was a small child. I'll leave you with a few of his images.

Indefinite Divisibility, 1942

Mama, Papa is Wounded!, 1927

Reply to Red, 1943

Multiplication of the Arcs, 1954

Thanks for reading.