As visualists, the sad truth is we have a poorer sense of the history of our medium than musicians. Part of this is simply a lack of access. YouTube is a weak substitute, but it’s a start. In that spirit, Karl (Format K) sends us the minimal geometric machinations of pioneering electronic graphics artist and animator John Whitney. We’ve previous mentioned the role of Whitney and Larry Cuba in helping the modern computer graphics industry to be born – with a little help from a movie called Star Wars. Here, you get a real sense of an artist working within the restrictions of the technology to produce something beautiful. It’s a chance to recognize how we’re indebted to this kind of work. While the temptation may be to replicate effects like this with more modern tools, they also illustrate how you can focus on a technique within a tool – and perhaps there’s a digital equivalent of focusing on artistic limitations.

The musical score turns this into a dream collaboration, with the work of Terry Riley.

It’s nice to have access to this, but boy, would I love to have an HD-quality rendition of many of these films available for download or on a high-quality medium like Blu-Ray. Any chance a modern-day Voyager would re-release seminal visualist work from decades past?

Calling Nam Jun Paik a video art pioneer would be too narrow to describe his impact. In exploding the idea of what television and television processing could be in his art, he helped create a conceptual revolution that cleared the path for today’s ubiquitous and always-dynamic screens. But to really understand that work, you might want to delve into the theory of cybernetics, for the same reasons that can help understand early, radical electronic music and the path we’re on today.

Rhizome has a lovely essay by Carolyn Kane, framed by a new gallery show in New York. That show should be a pilgrimage for ardent Paikists. With animal-machine hybrids and screens everywhere, this is the cybernetic thought process made manifest, just at a time when we’re finding new insight into our relationship with technology as it becomes mobile.

As a Buddha gazes into a screen, visualists can contemplate being the screens on which they project. As Kane writes:

Paik is well known for transforming the architectural function of the television set from a mere box to an element distributed in space. However, these interventions must also be contextualized with his ongoing interest in cybernetics, a theory of animals and machines in their environment. In 1971 Paik asserted that today, the “nature of [the] environment is much more on TV than on film or painting. In fact, TV (its random movement of tiny electrons) is the environment.”

Maybe it’s time for some new visualist manifestos.

The Cybernetic Pioneer of Video Art: Nam June Paik [Rhizome]

Product Placement from Matti Niinimäki on Vimeo.

It’s like Creature Comforts for the ad industry. But look out, traditional animators – still images can come to live almost magically through the interactive powers of Animata, an open source animation tool.

In a brilliant series of animated interviews, Product Placement populates its scenes with classic ad mascots, from Heinz’s Tom Tomato to anti-polluter PSA character Woodsy Owl. The audio comes from interviews with people connected to the ad industry being surprisingly frank and even cynical about the role of advertising in society. The audio for those interviews is an interesting project in itself – the Anti Advertising Agency had the novel idea of installing DIY motion-activated playback units to insert the conversations in public space, commenting on outdoor advertising.

But add motion, and the interviews take on a different meaning. Woodsy begs advertisers to tweak his mind with their ad techniques, as the Chicken of the Sea Tuna mermaid worries about greenwashing and her body image. (Fret not: you look just fine exactly the way you are, Chicken of the Sea mermaid.)

The work is the product of the gifted mind of Matti Niinimäki, whom we saw recently turning blenders and handheld mixers into DJ controllers. Matti, you’re amazing – can we just make these sites about you? (The Finnish “one-man collective” has his own site, alas, at original hamsters.)

Last Friday at MGFest Chicago, I gave a short talk on what real-time can mean for visuals. The crowd had a large contingent of traditional motion graphics designers - my own presentation was followed by a slick demo for using Cinema4D to do those flying logos you see so often - but folks did seem receptive to the idea that real-time visuals open up other possibilities.

Above are some of the slides, which give you an idea of the talk.

And, as I generally like to do…

We’ll Do it Live: How Real-Time is Changing Visuals by Peter Kirn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

All well and good, but next time I may replace the whole presentation with a hands-on demo of Animata. The live animation tool turns people into puppeteers (even Indonesian shadow puppeteers, if you like) and really demonstrates the idea of going form a compose - orchestrate - render model to live performance. It’s the difference between scoring a piano sonata and jamming live.

By the way, if you’re interested in me presenting something like this at your school or work, or hands-on presentations of any of the topics on cdmotion, do get in touch here on the site.

Apologies to the organizers of an event in the summer with the same phrase as its title - I’m also obsessed with Bill O’Reilly.

Photo credits:

The very things that make many of us so passionate about the bleeding edge of visual technology make us equally attached to vintage media – not out of nostalgia, out of a love of what is expressive.

Our friends over at Retro Thing have devoted their entire site to such matters. But as we mourn the loss of the Small Thing print magazine, they have some particularly useful posts this week related to some of those older formats.

Signs of hope:

Where To Find Regular 8mm Film

– that’s the important one. It’s possible to still go pick up Super 8 film, and I’m pleased to hear the Super 8 cartridges from Kodak are still being made. I’m actually a little surprised that super 8 footage isn’t making its way into more digital visualist sets.

New Low Cost 8mm Film Transfer Unit

– likely out of reach of many of us at US$1495, but still in a range that it could impact anyone who needs such transfers.

Polaroid Fanatics Gets Another Chance

– a long shot, but it seems former Polaroid employees are trying to rescue the old Instant Integral film plant in the Netherlands. That’s heartening, because the lousy new digital-printing Polaroids just aren’t the same. The whole appeal was watching that film develop.

What’s your favorite “antiquated” medium? Do you work with formats like 8mm or even film Polaroids for your sets? How do you get them in digital form? We’d love to hear from you.