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.

So much of the visual inspiration for digital generative visuals — even those that never leave the computer — come directly from analog electronics. There’s something organic about the motion visuals this gear creates. Case in point: the latest, short video from Mat Jarvis, the pioneering ambient artist, via his label Microscopics. Good stuff, and we’re glad to bring it to you first.

Speaking of pioneering vintage visuals, Mat Jarvis / Microscopics have also set music to the brilliant film “A Film Dealing with the Relative Size of Things in the Universe and the Effect of Adding Another Zero.” The film is the work of Charles and Ray Eames (yes, of chair/design fame), who probably deserve a CDMotion story all their own. It’s stunning to see this 1977 film predicting the worldview of technologies like Google Earth. In case you missed this on CDMusic:

Ambient music fans, here are details on the release of the album itself:

Microscopics Play with Scale on Gas0095, Give You Tiny Moog Model [Create Digital Music]

Microscopics Blog

Got some favorite oscilloscope films to share? Let us know.

Matthew Applegate sends this our way — it’s like two computers having a conversation, across epochs of computer history. The MacBook Pro is running a computer vision algorithm and "singing" notes based on colors it sees on the Spectrum’s screen.

Maybe this will get your brain thinking of something new — file this under "really odd inspirations."

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.

Star Wars: Prehistoric Computer Graphics [Retro Thing, via Boing Boing Gadgets]

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:

For Whitney’s 1960s work, see previously:

Videos from the Dawn of Video: Mechanical Effects and Oscilloscope Games

And for more on Larry Cuba, see:

Larry’s personal site

Larry Cuba on the Star Wars “Wookipedia”

Maybe it’s time to re-write that history of computer animation.