A bank of faders, a touchpad, and then … it just does anything you want. Even today, the idea of a fully-integrated visual instrument is a pretty profound concept. Ableton’s creators thought about the design of the Synclavier digital synth (the rival of the CVI’s music sibling, the CMI) when designing their software. At least a couple of you have some strong ideas about the future of "visual instruments" and live visualism in general. Certainly, I’ll be thinking about the CVI as I look at the setup of my live visual rig. The effects themselves on the CVI don’t all date well, especially after the CVI itself popularized their use (and overuse) in the 80s. But the elegance of the design as interface can still inspire.
Co-creator Peter Vogel has kept satisfying our appetite for gems from his VHS library. Thanks, Peter, for saving these from permanent deterioration. Top: watch a BBC host get a kick out of turning herself into a video star. Bottom: the original demo video, which gives a good overview of the effects capabilities. (Especially interesting, as students and artists learn to recreate some of the same effects from scratch in tools like Max/MSP/Jitter and Processing.) Tomorrow’s world, indeed.
How do you make a computer-animated sequence of 3D wireframe visuals of fancy, Empire-built battle stations — in 1977? Very, very slowly. Our friend James at Retro Thing, aside from being a electronic-sonic inventor, is a fan of vintage visuals and was already teaching the history of computer animation in the mid 80s. (Hint: prepping that class didn’t take quite as long then as it would now.)
James explains the origins of the famous Death Star briefing room sequence:
The wizard behind the early Star Wars CG was Larry Cuba, who worked out of the Electronic Visualization Lab (EVL) at the University of Illinois. Legend has it that he was pushing the hardware so hard to create the simple wireframe images that he constantly had to adjust the air conditioning in the computer room to avoid system crashes. Cuba used a vector graphics scripting language called GRASS (GRAphics Symbiosis System), written by Tom DeFanti at Ohio State in 1974. The system he used incorporated a Vector General CRT, DEC PDP-11 minicomputer, along with various cameras and recorders.
I have a special place in my heart for the original film Star Wars because — James will appreciate this — I initially experienced it as a kid only on sound Super 8 film, cut down to a svelte 17 minutes. (My understanding of narrative was never quite the same.)
But to me, these graphics don’t look primitive; they look elemental, much in the same way that you don’t get tired of ancient Egyptian art. (And in the timeline of computer graphics, it wouldn’t be a stretch to imagine thousands of years of art history happening in a few decades.)
The real star, though, is the film Cuba used to pitch computer graphics to George Lucas, Arabesque, made with John Whitney. If this 1975 film doesn’t inspire you as a visualist, nothing will. Correction: Evidently it wasn’t Arabesque, but the movie First Fig. Larry Cuba himself writes in comments:
Thank you for the appreciation of “Arabesque.” The film I screened for Lucas was actually my first CG film, “First Fig.”
(And you can connect the historical dots here, too: without Arabesque First Fig, no CG in Star Wars, no ILM CG, no Pixar.)
Well, George Lucas may or may not have seen Arabesque, but you can, below, and it’s still inspiring:
And for another Larry Cuba film, here’s the 1985 Calculated Movements:
The Digital Worlds blog, an Open University blog, has an excellent look back at the artistry of early video tubes entitled “Oscilloscopy.”
There’s John Whitney’s “showreel” from 1961, which shows off the ground-breaking (1961, folks!) possibilities of his “mechanical analog computer,” as appropriated from an antiaircraft gun director. Wait … say that again? Yep, Whitney actually used a mechanical contrivance to rotate layers of graphics. When that technique met up with the power of It’s an idea that’s just waiting for today’s DIYers to tackle, perhaps mixing modern digital techniques with mechanical ones.
Next, also from the above blog post, witness the gorgeous oscilloscope graphics and mechanical control pads of Tennis for Two, an early (thought to be the second-ever, though you never know with these things) video game made by William Higinbotham at the Brookhaven National Laboratory. Again, DIY project? Mechanical controllers, but this time coupled with 3D graphics? It is the 50th anniversary year of the title. (People under 35, remember that the next time your parents start talking about “back in their day” before video games. Tell them it’s not your fault they never dropped by the Brookhaven National Laboratory.)
Heck, I wish even oscilloscopes looked that pretty now.
There’s something really inspiring and elemental about these works — amplified by mechanical elements used in their creation and control. It’s something I think is possible in code; maybe it’s just challenging in a different way. (And maybe when you have that feeling of magic, you know you’re in the right place.)
This certainly gives me a different source of inspiration as I work with generative techniques in Java/Processing and the like. If this inspires any of your work, send us photos / video links — we’d love to see it! And motion graphics history buffs, happy to know more about these — and other — pioneers.
Interestingly, while a lot of people will dismiss the 8-bit movement as “nostalgic” — implying it’s just 20-somethings pining for their Mario-playing childhoods — Paris’ inspiration was originally vintage analog synthesizers. And synthesizing graphics is his main interest:
I concentrate on creating graphics from scratch. That’s pretty much all I do. Other people like using movie clips and manipulating them, but from my point of view it’s a good exercise to see what you can do when you have to create everything from scratch. It gives you an appreciation to form and color.
The synthesis/sampling argument I think is very much related to the way electronic music is produced. I find that focusing on either one can be a good exercise — see our friend Troels sampling Coke bottles, for instance.
It’s nice stuff, but I do hope, particularly here in the US where the VJ/visualist scene has had trouble gaining broader recognition, that we start to see other styles on genres forming more coherent “scenes” in the way 8-bit has. Of course, what has happened for people like Paris is he’s found strong advocates in the musicians, which seems to be a key element (and has helped strengthen the visual work done outside chiptune music, as well).
Digital tech is fantastic — but I’m equally inspired by the real-for-real attitude that extended into the early digital age. Now that the French duo Justice have done a send up of a ridiculous number of early “motion graphics” (well, before they were really called that), I think there’s plenty of opportunity to get ideas for our digital world. Motioners, I have a challenge — well, two challenges, in fact:
1. How many retro animation spot references can you spot in this video? (The flying HBO logo being a personal favorite of mine — ah, that day when we first discovered premium cable. It was like entering the future. And you could tape stuff, too, like Fraggle Rock or whatever.)
2. Got any insight into how some of these original videos were produced? Computer graphics found their way into ad spots as early as the 1970s, even via the gang who would go on to found Pixar. But, of course, many productions continued to use traditional animation techniques well into the 1980s — heck, even Tron did a lot of optical work and even cel animation.
The inimitable Joel Johnson at Boing Boing Gadgets points to this video, and reader Reed Savory points out that the HBO logo was all models and traditional animation:
They don’t talk a whole lot about the actual letters, but you have to give HBO credit for making what has to be the most ridiculous — and strangely compelling — station ident ever. For me, the movies were always kind of a let-down after that — perhaps an early childhood sign that I’d get bitten by the visualist bug.
I miss ANSI art. In the character-only days of the online world (pre-Web), these text-based graphics had a strangely pop-art quality, with hard edges, digital textures, and bold colors. This is not to be confused with ASCII art, mind you — ANSI art had lots of extra graphical features. Even by the early 1990s, landing on a modem-based BBS with ANSI art felt like leaving the grungy dullness of the country for the Los Vegas strip.
Which brings us to the relevance to this site. I’ve seen lots of cheesy ASCII art filters for video, implemented in environments like Processing, for one. But how about motion graphics with ANSI? Now that’s an interesting challenge. Or, for that matter, given infinite choices, how can you make your own creative constraints to do something essential and artistic? ANSI’s appeal might be purely nostalgic, but it suggests that more power over pixels has sometimes given us less freedom, not more. Something to ponder while you’re coding / editing / visualizing — there’s a chance to make up your own restrictions.
20 goto 10 in San Francisco will feature “ANSI”, curated by Acid Jazz from artists Somms & Lord Jazz.
The great Rutt/Etra synthesizer repair party is almost over (hear all about it in a past episode of VJ-U). Daniel Summer threw the party, Matthew Schlanger hosted it, Messrs. Steve Rutt and Bill Etra came to repair and perform with the machines, respectively, many others, including Benton-C and Kyle Lapidus, came to help repair them (you know who you are), and David Last and I stopped by to play with them yesterday. David shot some great pictures (see slideshow below or on Flickr) of the machines and a new composition by Bill. Note: the screenshots were photographed off of a monitor while Benton was capturing the HD footage of Bill’s work, and David played with the hue of the images in Photoshop to give them a little variety. I will upload some HD footage of my own play on the Rutt/Etra sometime soon. If you’re in New York City, you can see some of it when I play my set with DJ Olive at {R}ake next Wednesday the 30th.
Critter and Guitari, creators of the aforementioned DIY hardware Critter boards have released their PCB design files. Is it everything you need to make your own Video Critter? I don’t know enough about circuits to be sure, but it’s exciting that the information is now freely available. [via Make]
Data Is Nature brings to our attention the Valsuka Archive, an incredible trove of early video art history, exhibitions, work, designs and circuit diagrams. Paul describes it better than I:
The Vasulka Archive is massive repository of documents from the pioneering days of electronic, computer and video art. Containing a staggering 27000 pages of scanned documents, replete with hand typed texts, circuit diagrams and skuzzy ink marks, I could spend the rest of the week perusing this stuff, believe me. The big names are here, Crutchfield, Conrad, Paik, Van der Beek, Youngblood etc - hand written correspondences to the Vasulka’s as well as reviews and even obituaries of each artist/scientist - but history is selective and remembers according to its own algorithm. Encouragingly, not only do we find artifacts from the so called key movers of the time but also an exhaustive list of lesser, and relatively unknown practitioners waiting to be (re)discovered.
Check out the The Vasulka Archive and see what has inspired every generation of video artist. From TV to film to Music Video and club style VJing, it all started with these pioneers.
Digital process has often been the enemy of craft. Italy, once the land of highly skilled typographers, calligraphers, and music engravers, has given way to static, boxed-up, boring fonts like the rest of the world. It’s only fitting, then, that some lovers of type and digital media would fight back.
Andren writes in to share his Master Degree Thesis in visual communication design at Politecnico di Milano, an open source investigation of type and process called “A Digital Remake.” The results are simply stunning: drawing upon the 1906 work of Edward Johnston on type, he reconstructs in digital form the process of constructing illuminated type. The translation from traditional media to digital manages to be loving without being slavish: this is truly a digital analog to the original process. Generating random particles and connecting them with beautiful curves, the new type evolves organically, unmistakably digital but rooted in the past.
I can’t look at these without getting ideas for animated text. It’s surprising to me, in fact, that text hasn’t inspired more visualist exploration and live VJ sets. Previous font coverage here on CDM:
The project was coded in Python using NodeBox, a Mac OS X 2D design tool. The syntax and design concepts are actually not unlike Processing, and I could imagine Processing coders being inspired by the results to think of some analog in that tool, with the added option of 3D. Here’s a brief, oversimplified but hopefully vaguely accurate comparison of the two (I’ve only used Processing, not NodeBox):
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2007-Oct-30@03:50
