Friday, January 08, 2010

New Canvas - what was shown previously

Copied from previous webpage that I can no longer find online.

I think this was 2005


Programme

1.Poemfield # 2 Stan Vanderbeek and Kenneth Knowlton 1966 USA 6 min

A text based computer film produced with Kenneth Knowlton at Bell laboratories

Born in 1927—died in 1984.VanDerBeek studied art and architecture first at Cooper Union College in New York and then at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where he met architect Buckminster Fuller, composer John Cage, and choreographer Merce Cunningham. VanDerBeek began his career in the 1950s making independent art film while learning animation techniques and working painting scenary and set designs for the American TV show, "Winky Dink and You." . His desire for the utopian led him to work with Ken Knowlton in a co-operation at the Bell Telephone Company laboratories, where dozens of computer animated films and holographic experiments were created by the end of the 1960's. At the same time, He taught at many universities, researching new methods of representation, from the steam projections at the Guggenheim Museum to the interactive television transmissions of his "Violence Sonata2 broadcast on several channels in 1970.



2.Cibernetik 5.3 John Stehura 1965-69 USA 16mm Colour 8 min

A personal , self - propelled and mainly self funded project, Cibernetik 5.3 was a personal mission for John Stehura..

"John"s [Stehura's] spectacular film Cibernetik 5.3 combines computer graphics with organic live-action photography to create a new reality, a Third World Reality, that is both haunting and extraordinarily beautiful. Cybernetik makes use of realist imagery for its nonobjective qualities and thus impinges directly upon the emotions more successfully than any computer film discussed in this book. However, John considers the film only an "incidental test" in an ongoing experiment with computer graphics that has occupied most of his time for the last nine years. John is interested in addressing the computer directly through graphic images rather than using mathematics to achieve graphic images and thus becoming enmeshed in a "number game." Cybernetik is unique also in that it was constructed from semi-random image-generation techniques. Whereas most of the computer films discussed so far are characterized by mathematical precision, Cybernetik exudes a strong feeling for the uncontrolled, the uncontrollable, the unconceivable."

- Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema, 1969

3.Hummingbird Charles Csuri 1967 USA B/W 10 min

"We completed a ten minute computer animated film entitled Hummingbird. The subject was a line drawing of a hummingbird for which a sequence of movements appropriate to the bird were outlined. Over 30,000 images comprising some 25 motion sequences were generated by the computer. For these, selected sequences were used for the film. A micro-film plotter recorded the images directly to film. To facilitate control over the motion of some sequences, the programs were written to read all the controlling parameters from cards, one card for each frame. Curve fit or other date generating programs were used to punch the parameter decks. We also built a windowing option into our plot subroutine. "

- Charles Csuri


Courtesy of The Huntington and Csuri Archives
College of the Arts The Ohio State University



4. The Flexipede Tony Pritchett 1968 UK 2 min

Courtesy of Tony Pritchett and Cache AHRB at Birkbeck

Tony Pritchett, (born England 1938) known for Flexipede, one of the first examples of digital film created in 1967. It took several months to make during 1966 and 1967, using the London University Atlas computer (a supercomputer in those days, with 128K of online memory), programmed in Fortran on punched cards with a 2-hour turn-around time, and output on the first microfilmrecorder in the UK. The microfilm recorder was only capable of drawing black lines on to a square area of the film frame,which accounts for its rather restricted graphic style. Flexipede was shown publicly for the first time at the Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in 1968.



5.Permutations John Whitney 1966 USA 8 min

Music by Balachandra. In this film, Whitney developed the musical concept of consonance/dissonance (extension, tension) with a visual art by means of the computer.

Whitney points out that the effects created by the graphic figures are similar with some of the effects of tension produced by the music. :

"In PERMUTATIONS, each point moves at a different speed and moves in a direction independent according to natural laws' quite as valid as those of Pythagoras, while moving in their circular field. Their action produces a phenomenon more or less equivalent to the musical harmonies. When the points reach certain relationships (harmonic) numerical to other parameters of the equation, they form elementary figures."- John Whitney

Permutations features beautiful computer generated visuals made from strips of film as part of an IBM research program on computer graphics. Whitney's images were made by selecting numerical variables that determine particular graphic patterns. Whitney described Permutations as "the first step toward developing a compositional language by which the art of graphics in motion might be structured in time."



6.Olympiad Lillian Schwartz 1971 USA 2:35 min
Music: Max Mathews
Courtesy of Lillian Schwartz and Lumen

A study in motion based on Muybridge's photographs of man running. "Figures of computer stylized athletes are seen in brilliant hues chasing each other across the screen. Images are then reversed and run across the screen in the other direction”

link to A beautiful virus inside the machine

7.Two Space Larry Cuba 1979 USA 8 min

Two dimensional patterns, like the tile patterns of Islamic temples, are generated by performing a set of symmetry operations (translations, rotations, and reflections) upon a basic figure or tile. Two Space consists of twelve such patterns produced using each of nine different animating figures (12 x 9 = 108 total). Rendered in stark black and white, the patterns produce optical illusions of figure-ground reversal and afterimages of color. Gamelan music from the classical tradition of Java adds to the mesmerizing effect.

Curated by Greg Kurcewicz for Animated Exeter

No comments: