Leonardo Synthetics: A History of the Electronically Generated Image in Australia Author(s): Stephen Jones Source: Leonardo, Vol. 36, No. 3 (2003), pp. 187-195 Published by: The MIT Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1577359 . Accessed: 10/06/2014 21:32 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . The MIT Press and Leonardo are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Leonardo. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 188.72.127.114 on Tue, 10 Jun 2014 21:32:55 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Transcript
Leonardo
Synthetics: A History of the Electronically Generated Image in AustraliaAuthor(s): Stephen JonesSource: Leonardo, Vol. 36, No. 3 (2003), pp. 187-195Published by: The MIT PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1577359 .
Accessed: 10/06/2014 21:32
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].
.
The MIT Press and Leonardo are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access toLeonardo.
http://www.jstor.org
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puter art and video synthesis in Australia from its earliest man- ifestation through to the late 1980s. I focus on the artists and the technologies they used, with pointers to cultural/aesthetic issues. The technologies derive from computing-both ana-
log, which evolved into audio and video synthesizers, and dig- ital, which was domesticated over this period.
DATA VISUALIZATION
Techniques for the production of images from electronically encoded data first developed with the use of the cathode ray tube (CRT) for electronic waveform display, radar and televi- sion. In the 1950s and 1960s in the U.S.A. and Europe scien- tific data visualization, computer-aided design (CAD) and mathematical explorations drove early computer-graphic (CG) developments [ 1 ]. In Australia the first computer-calculated CRT-displayed image appeared in DickJenssen's thesis of 1959 [2]. That image, of a weather map showing atmospheric pres- sure regions over Australia, was generated on a CRT display- ing memory in Australia's first computer, CSIRAC [3], at Melbourne University in 1957. The 16 X 20-dot image (Fig. 1) was photographed and an outline map of Australia was then drawn over it.
Data visualization continued over the next decade as Aus- tralia's base of machines widened, especially within academic institutions. In 1968, the Aeronautical Engineering Depart- ment of Sydney University was investigating the impact of very- low-density gases on aerofoils for the U.S. Air Force. The usual methods-smoke streams in a wind tunnel-do not work under
very low atmospheric pressure, so the gases' behavior had to be simulated on the Computer Science Department's IBM 7040 [4]. The results were then rendered as a visualization on the
department's recently acquired Digital Equipment Corpora- tion PDP-8 and its 338-vector display, using software written by Doug Richardson. The visualization was recorded to film frame
by frame, with the color produced by switching color filters in front of the lens, all controlled by the PDP-8 [5] (Fig. 2).
COMPUTER ART The head of Computer Science at Sydney University, John Ben- nett, had been in the U.K. in 1968 and had seen the Cyber-
netic Serendipity exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London [6]. He returned to Aus- tralia with a collection of CG slides from artists and programmers and
began to proselytize computer art to students and computing profes- sionals there [7]. Artists and com-
puters did not mix in those days. The process of writing and running a program was difficult, and the re- sults often arrived a day later. The
ABSTRACT
This paper takes a brief look at the early years of computer- graphic and video- synthesizer-driven image production in Australia. It begins with the first (known) Australian data visualization, in 1957, and proceeds through the composit- ing of computer graphics and video effects in the music videos of the late 1980s. The author surveys the types of work produced by workers on the computer graphics and video synthesis systems of the early period and draws out some indications of the influ- ences and interactions among artists and engineers and the technical systems they had available, which guided the evolution of the field for artistic production.
freedom to modify and develop ideas on the fly was simply not available. Bennett prompted Richardson to try to align the
computer with the artistic process. Richardson built a system of software and hardware for the PDP-8 that would allow artists to draw on the display screen with a light pen and manipulate the image in real time under manual or audio-synthesizer con- trol by patching potentiometers and inputs to control values in the software [8]. Richardson called his system the Visual Piano and used it to produce elegant mathematical patterns of spiraling vectors (Fig. 3). He ran a course for artists to learn to use the system. The results were mixed, but some people took to it well. These included Frank Eidlitz and the Bush Video group.
Fig. 1. Weather map as a 16 X 20 bit-map produced on the memory monitoring CRT on CSIRAC by DickJenssen, 1957. (? M.J. Ditmar Jenssen) The original acleulations were done on the UTECOM at the then University of Technology New South Wales (now UNSW) and the punched tape output was then converted to an image on the CSIRAC at the University of Melbourne as part of Jenssen's masters thesis in 1957.
Stephen Jones (artist, electronic engineer), 387 Riley Street, Surry Hills, NSW, 2010, Australia. E-mail: <[email protected]>.
Fig. 2. Visualization of the behavior of gas molecules in a very low-density atmosphere (at the edge of space) against an aerofoil, produced by Doug Richardson on a PDP-8, 1969. (? Doug Richardson) The original simulations for the Aeronautical Engineering Department of the University of Sydney were made on an IBM 7040 and the results networked to the PDP-8 for display and animation.
Frank Eidlitz was a commercial artist who had studied with Gyorgy Kepes at the Massachusetts Institute of Technol- ogy in 1966 and became familiar with computers there. Working with Richard- son in the early 1970s, he built up images from a few geometrically placed lines that were then moved about the screen to produce essentially wire-frame shapes (Fig. 4). These were photographed to large-format transparencies and trans- ferred onto colored papers as collages to make up the final colored image. Eidlitz and Richardson had several exhibitions of their joint work [9].
Bush Video was a collective of archi- tects, filmmakers, techno-hippies and community activists established by Mick Glasheen. Glasheen had produced the first experimental video art in Australia, his 1970 production Teleological Telecast from Spaceship Earth: On Board with Buck- minster Fuller, and discovered Richard- son's system during an Open Day at the university. He asked Richardson to help him draw and animate the flight of a boomerang for a film he was working on. Ariel, another member of Bush Video, also used the Visual Piano to draw and animate mandala shapes based on the Hindu tantra (Fig. 5). These were used in multitudinous ways in many of the video mixes produced in the Bush Video studio. Ariel was also interested in the electronic generation of video images, building various audio oscillators and modifying a monochrome monitor by re- placing the deflection signals with am- plified audio to cause the video image to twist and curl in response to music and
synthesized waveforms. Bush Video ex- plored many kinds of video performance and synthesis processes using a small video mixer, a colorizer that was occa- sionally available and video feedback, in which pointing a camera at a monitor
showing its output generates streams of echoes trailing from any images mixed in with the camera output, producing images ranging from the exquisitely flo- ral to the wildly chaotic.
Bush Video dissolved in late 1975. In 1976 Ariel bought an IMSAI S-100 buss computer kit and subsequently went on to develop his own CG system. His system used a Z-80 CPU [10], 32 kilobytes of RAM under the CP/M operating system and a bit-mapped graphics display, which generated a video raster with 256 pixels by 256 lines at three bits/pixel [11]. Bit- mapped displays could not render im- ages in real time at this stage, and the vector-display system that Richardson had developed was no longer available, having broken down. However, what was lost in response time was more than made up for in the capacity to draw com- plex imagery made up of lines and sur- faces. Three-dimensional images could now potentially be much more interest- ing despite the rendering time they re- quired. Ariel tried to reproduce what Richardson had been doing with the Vi- sual Piano, and much of his work during this period involved developing a wire- frame 3D graphics system that could push the images around the screen. To
Fig. 3. Spiraling vectors image produced by Doug Richardson on his Visual Piano real-time display system implemented on the PDP-8 at the Basser Department of Computer Science, University of Sydney, 1971-1972. (? Doug Richardson)
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Fig. 4. Multiple rectangles collage by Frank Eidlitz and Doug Richardson, produced on Richardson's Visual Piano, 1974. (? The estate of Frank Eidlitz, and Doug Richardson) A large-format transparency was made from a photograph of the screen and colored papers were laid behind the transparency, producing variations in density from the colors of the papers.
record an animated sequence he used a Super-8 film camera modified to take one frame at a time under the control of the computer.
ually or by audio sources. This inspired him to work on video image synthesis techniques. In 1974, he received a grant from the Australian Council for the Arts to build a video synthesizer. He bought a
color TV, which he modified to take red, green and blue (RGB) inputs, a mono- chrome camera, a video mixer and a video recorder and assembled hybrid analog/digital shape generators, audio oscillators and 8 TV Ping-Pong circuits. Control, object and pattern selection was done with plug-boards, and by sending different signals to the RGB channels Hansen could colorize the results, which were also encoded to composite video for recording. "Resultant imagery reflected the viscousness of live analogue com- bined with the railroad track predictive- ness of digitally generated objects" [13].
AUSTRALIA '75 These events of the early 1970s occurred during a period of the re-inspiration of modern dance, a widening interest in ex- perimental video production and great fecundity in the presentation of new and electronic music. In 1975 Richardson or- ganized an exhibition, called Computers in the Arts, at Australia '75 [14], an arts festival held in Canberra. This exhibition became a most important meeting place for everyone involved in electronic arts in Australia. Richardson showed some of his work, Bush Video members were there, Hansen debuted his video synth and Dun- stan brought his hand-built audio syn- thesizers. The Australian National Uni- versity (ANU) Department of Engineer- ing Physics was involved, Phillipa Cullen and her dance company brought a
pressure-sensitive floor, and there were
VIDEO SYNTHESIS John Hansen studied electronic engi- neering and later worked at the Zoology Department at Monash University in Mel- bourne, where he built telemetry equip- ment to track animals. Electronic music maker Stephen Dunstan introduced him to "theremins and white noise, pink noise, oscillators, all this sort of stuff" [12]. Hansen's earliest foray into elec- tronic images was to convert an old black- and-white TV set to operate like an oscilloscope driven by audio oscillators. He caused it to display images in color by building a color filter wheel that was spun in front of the TV by an old washing- machine motor, the speed of which was synchronized to the oscillators. It de- stroyed itself spectacularly one evening and, as he remarked, had everybody not been lying on the floor at the time, some- body would have been killed.
In the early 1970s Hansen found a TV Ping-Pong electronic game circuit that generated objects that "sailed" around the screen and could be triggered man-
Fig. 5. Frame from a video recording of Mandala images produced by Ariel, a member of Bush Video, using Richardson's Visual Piano, 1974. (? Mark Evans/Ariel) The rotating mandalas, called yantra, were recorded in real time from the Visual Piano display to 1/2-in black-and-white video portapack.
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Fig. 6. John Hansen's tapestry-style image produced with his first computer-controlled video synthesizer, 1980. (? John Hansen)
several other people with theremins, syn- thesizers and computer music systems.
A remarkable collaboration at Australia '75 illuminates the way things developed in those days. The connection between Cullen's pressure-sensitive floor and the synthesizers failed and appeared unfix- able, so Cullen and her dancers decided that they should go home, there being no further possibility for interactivity. But others with systems in the exhibition got together to solve the problem. Iain Macleod and Chris Ellyard (of ANU En- gineering Physics), who were running a PDP-11/40 system, wrote software that al- lowed the computer to read inputs from the floor via an analog-to-digital (A/D) converter, using this data to trace a "his- tory" of the dancer's movements as an image. That image was then sent to Hansen's video synthesizer, where it was combined with camera images of the dancers, video feedback and colorizing. The dancers moved to music supplied by Dunstan and his audio synthesizer, which also supplied audio modulation for con- trol of Hansen's video synthesizer. The output was displayed on a wall of color video monitors [15]. Performances on this integrated system drew large crowds, and opportunities to play with the system were taken up at every possible instance. This happened almost overnight and demonstrated just how much interest there was in integrating all sorts of dis- parate systems as well as how willing ev- eryone was to do everything possible to make this integration work.
Hansen's video synthesizer was also used in making studio dance works but was quickly superseded. In 1976, he bought an Intel 8080 computer devel- opment kit with 256 bytes of RAM and a
screen memory board, which displayed 128 x 128 pixels of 4 bits each (we now use 24-bit deep pixels; in those days the costs of memory meant that 4 bits per pixel-allowing 16 colors-was quite luxurious) using 8 kilobytes of RAM. He built a keyboard and a 32-character-by- 16-row character-generator display syn- chronized to the video. A fast A/D converter was added for digitized camera input. Plug-boards and push-button- actuated pre-programmed sequences enabled mixing of video, character- generator and computer-generated dis- plays to RGB outputs. Finally a light pen interface was added. All this was assem- bled into a scrapped Friden calculator chassis. Software was written in 8080 ma- chine language, typed into the system RAM, debugged and burnt into EPROMs (erasable programmable read-only mem- ory chips), giving basic shapes, a pseudo- random number generator, pixel shifting, shape gating, horizontal and vertical sym- metry and a command selector. The screen memory address counters were also used to produce patterns that, with the symmetry routines, produced quadri- lateral symmetry. Hansen describes the images from this system as his "tapestry" phase [ 16]. He entered some of these im- ages in the International Federation for
Fig. 7. Martha McKelvey, Three Magpies, drawn on Vision Control's Conjure 2D paint system developed by John Hansen, 1985. (? Martha McKelvey)
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Fig. 8. Screen grab from Meditations, by Warren Burt; using video feedback through the CVI and a CVI-generated background layer with the feedback being grabbed and dragged across the screen, 1986. Although this work was made at International Synergy in Los Angeles, the CVI is an Australian instrument that was widely used in the mid-1980s. (Photo: Kira Perov. ? Warren Burt.)
Information Processing world computer- art competition in 1980 and won second
prize [17] (Fig. 6).
DISPLAY-LIST GRAPHICS
Subsequently Hansen bought a Z-80- based system [18] and developed a display-list-driven 2D graphics and paint system called Conjure, with help from Chris Ellyard, whom he had met at Aus- tralia '75. This vector-graphics approach, in which the object drawing instructions are executed sequentially, came from CAD. Drawn objects could be scaled to any desired resolution and their color characteristics, drawing position and order of appearance could be freely changed. Conjure provided line, curve and rectangle primitives, shaded color fills and palette cycling for limited ani- mation. The system was driven from a digitizing pad and pen, with menus and drawing areas on the pad surface. It used a 512 x 512 X 8-bit graphics card that could directly output RGB video signals for encoding and could also digitize video images, combining them with drawn images or text characters. It could also provide output to a film recorder via a vector processor that scaled up the drawing resolution to 4000 pixels for a 35mm slide. A subsequent IBM-PC ver- sion of Conjure enjoyed reasonable suc- cess, being used for television graphics,
logos and business-presentation graphics [19] (Fig. 7).
Although computer technology and graphics programs were quite slow, even into the late 1980s, they allowed the stor-
age of image data so that it could be re- peatedly sent to a monitor under pro- gram control. In many ways, the evolu- tion of graphical computing actually led to a slowing of the image-display process. Systems that had once been real-time and interactive gave way to the need to pre- program and predetermine, although there was a huge gain in the range of things that could be displayed. The change from the vector display to the bit- mapped raster monitor and the increase in image content both contributed to this loss of real-time control or "playability." Suddenly interactivity had to be planned for, being no longer inherent as it was in analog synthesizers. The Conjure system, an example of this loss of real-time dis- play, was designed to solve the problem by speeding up the image-generation process. In contrast, video synthesizers, being analog devices, were inherently sloppy and essentially performative in- struments, played with knobs, sliders and push-buttons.
VISUAL MUSIC
Warren Burt studied music in the U.S.A. In his early work he used slowly chang-
ing timbres in musical tones and, with the left and right channels of the audio being fed to the horizontal and vertical chan- nels of an oscilloscope, would produce swirling Lissajous figures that were al- lowed to run over long periods; as pre- sented pieces, they ran by themselves. Burt was invited to set up the electronic music studio in the Music Department at Latrobe University, coming to Australia in 1975. He established a studio based on the Serge synthesizer, a Daisy random- voltage generator and an EMS Spectre video synthesizer developed by Richard Monkhouse in the U.K The Spectre had its own shape generators and combina- tion blocks based on digital logic, a pin- board matrix patching system, a colorizer and video-camera input, which allowed video feedback processes that provided a mobile, chaotic feel to the imagery.
Burt began by utilizing algorithmic sys- tems in producing synthesized sounds; he then extended these systems to video using audio synthesizers in both the pro- duction of music and the production of images. For example, using the same en- velope waveforms to control the sound and the images caused the images to move through very slow changes that matched the slowly changing harmonics of the drones that he often worked with. The important idea was to allow the pro- cess to work itself through. At other times these connections were not so direct and might be interrupted in the perfor- mance of the work. For Burt, perfor- mance requires real-time control over the process, and only analog systems pro- vide this [20].
Burt has also used the Fairlight CVI (Fig. 8) standalone and in combination with the Spectre and has recently been making works using a real-time PC graph- ics animation system called PIP, which uses iterated functions to produce chaotic graphics. He has also been mak- ing live opera and music performance works.
THE CYBERNETIC ATTRACTION
I met the Bush Video people (Ariel, Mick Glasheen and numerous others) at a uni- versity arts festival in 1973, discovering that they were well versed in cybernetics and feedback, systems theory, electron- ics and computers. On joining up with them in 19741 began exploring feedback (Fig. 9) and image transformation and learned about editing and the electron- ics of video. Ariel helped me understand microprocessors and the electronics of video synthesis. While in Melbourne for
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Fig. 9. Stephen Jones, complex video feedback image constrained through a circle wipe in the video mixer, 1988. (? Stephen Jones)
the Video Spectrum exhibition [21] or- ganized in 1977 by Warren Burt and the student's union of Latrobe University, I metJohn Hansen, who also gave invalu- able assistance.
Over 1978-1979 I built a video syn- thesizer consisting of various video- synchronizable voltage-controlled oscil- lators that could be set for horizontal or vertical video frequencies. They could be patched to four inputs of an 8 x 8 switch- ing matrix, with four video inputs for cam- era, videotape or colorizer. The switching matrix fed a matte-generator and three video mixers that could be controlled by any of the video, matte or oscillator sources. The three mixers supplied out- puts that could be considered RGB sources and fed into a color encoder. Al- ternatively, one output could be fed to a colorizer, the output of which could then be fed back into the switching matrix and mixed with an off-tape source. Coupled with video feedback, it gave a highly mu- table patterned image, ranging from raw noise to rectilinear regularity.
In July 1982 Metro TV presented "Fu- ture Imagery "-The Electronic Phenomenon, and I was invited to demonstrate the video synthesizer. I asked the electronic
music band Severed Heads to do a live recording in the Metro TV video studio using the video synthesizer in the mix. This was my first show with Severed
Heads, and I subsequently worked with them for 9 years, playing video synthe- sizer live onstage.
FROM THE ABSTRACT TO THE FIGURATIVE
As trends developed, the generated image-the image without referent, sig- nifying only itself-became intolerable to many artists. "Great effect, now what are you going to do with it?" was a com- mon criticism of much early synthetic work. Demand for greater figurativity and meaning in the imagery increased, and what had in its earliest days been con- sidered a merely formal medium, seen in the same way as experimental music, now had to become a carrier of content, a ve- hicle for ideas, no longer simply the ex- pression of certain ideas in itself. More control was needed, especially over the shape of the result, and so emerging do- mestic computer technology was readily embraced by working artists.
During the 1980s the generation of more realistic images and the inclusion of the synthesized image in a more com- plex, collaged, semi-realistic image con- veying layers of meaning developed through the use of devices like the Com- modore Amiga and the Fairlight CVI. The video collage became a kind of com- pressed evening's TV viewing, appropri- ated, remodeled and recombined into a new language of visual fragments in which the partial image is recontextual- ized by its neighbors, paralleling con- temporary (McLuhanist) intellectual
Fig. 10. Sally Pryor, 3D wire-frame image from the computer animation Dream House, 1983. (? Sally Pryor) Images were made on an engineering CAD system at Swinburne Institute of Technology, Melbourne, in Australia's first computer animation course.
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Fig. 11. Screen grab fromJetlag, by Severed Heads, made up with the authors' video synthe- sizer and a Lissajous figure, 1989. (? Stephen Jones)
currents regarding the nature of TV as a montage of disconnected ideas. These cut-ups of the synthetic and the figura- tive image appear in the work of Severed Heads and Peter Callas.
After working as a film editor for TV news, Peter Callas began to use video in his studies at art school. He became in- terested in the reading of images and in breaking television's illusion of the real. His video collage work emphasizes the physicality of the video image, using a repetitive, anti-realistic imagery that, while figurative, gains meaning through its dis- connection from the television form. In 1981, Callas traveled through southeast Asia andJapan, becoming fascinated with the curious ways that non-Western cul- tures used the TV, including its re-siting in everything from architecture to the street utility pole. In 1984 he bought a Fairlight CVI and returned to Japan, where in 1986 he accepted a residency in the studio at the Marui department store in Shibuya, Tokyo. His work there fore- grounded the potential of the CVI.
The CVI is a computer dedicated to graphic and video processing, using a video-memory with flexible pixel ad- dressing that allows highly mobile and kaleidoscopic images, plus a stenciling process by which live images and their stored derivatives may be cut together through various types of matting. The control panel gives live control of image movement, step-framing, matting and colorizing and provides a small drawing tablet, which Callas used to great advan- tage, producing collections of cartoon-
like characters and objects derived from popular mythologies that marched across the screen to the rhythm of accompany- ing music overlaid on strobing, counter- marching patterned backgrounds. Bright and full of energy, these electric images run as elements of a dancing mosaic of popular icons, e.g. his use of the pre-World War II Japanese Menko card
game in his work Kinema no Yoru (1986) or a 1930s German boy's scrapbook of images in Bilderbuch fur Ernst Will
(1990-1993). His works present a sharply critical eye on currents of ideas and their iconography in 20th-century cultures (Color Plate A No. 2).
On returning to Australia in 1987, Callas arranged with Fairlight to borrow two more CVIs and set up a three-system stack that allowed a kind of digital layer- ing. He could now have two sources of animation being treated in the third. Callas stated:
I would spend many months drawing these stencilled layers and then at a cer- tain time start to combine them together basically without any script because what I was interested in was building up this retinue of things which could be com- bined in a fairly spontaneous way [22].
Callas's explorations of the figurative remained critical and detached. Later commissions allowed him to use Quan- tel and SGI-based systems. These systems ushered CG into the commercial age through their synthesis and elaboration of the naturalistic image.
TOWARDS THE COMMERCIAL INDUSTRY . . .
Sally Pryor studied biochemistry at uni- versity and then retrained as a compu- ter analyst-programmer. Working as an
Fig. 12. Frame from a video clip for Greater Reward, by Severed Heads, 1989. (? Tom Ellard) The Dancing Bats were produced by Tom Ellard on an Amiga and composited onto a back- ground of bicycle spokes (also drawn on the Amiga) and colored feedback during video production.
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analyst-programmer did not satisfy her creative needs, however. She wanted to make "beautiful, lush pictures," not the standard line-printer output. But wire- frame output was all there was, and she found it quite a battle "to get an aesthetic happening with that" [23]. Her interest waned and she started looking for more stimulating and emotionally satisfying ways of working. She says of the period:
It was very uncool to be a tech-head at the time, in contrast to now. It wasn't smart to be interested in computers and you kept it a secret, and it was quite un- usual to be a woman in that environment [24].
She was studying art in her spare time and, with her friend Andrew Quinn, en- rolled in the new computer animation course at the Swinburne Institute of Technology. The course used a Tektronix storage-tube display 3D CAD system made available through the Engineering Department at the institute and software developed at Brigham Young University called Movie.BYU [25]. Graphical primi- tives included lines, circles and rectan- gles as well as extrusion, volumes of revolution and "tweening" between key frames. Objects had to be drawn out on graph paper to work out the coordinates, which were then typed into the drawing script. Animated sequences were re- corded to film. Color was added via an optical printer. Pryor produced a short animation called Dreamhouse, which at- tempted to introduce emotional warmth and a sense of her own self-exploration into the hard-edged world of wire-frame computer animation (Fig. 10). It proved to be very successful, being the first Aus- tralian computer work selected for the SIGGRAPH Electronic Theatre (1984) [26].
At the 1983 Australian Computer Con- ference in Melbourne, Pryor met Wayne Carlson from Cranston Csuri Produc- tions (CCP), who needed more staff. She and Quinn were offered jobs and went to CCP in Ohio, working on various proj- ects in the burgeoning U.S. commercial computer animation business. Projects included logos for the Australian Broad- casting Commission. In 1985, while at CCP, Pryor independently produced still graphics such as One Nuclear Bomb Could Ruin Your Whole Day and All Night I Dreamed at 32 Bits per Pixel to help herself escape the pressure and boredom of commercial production in Reagan's America.
Pryor bought herself an Amiga and re- turned to Australia in 1986. She joined the newly formed Video Paintbrush Company (VPB), producing 3D anima-
tion for television commercials using Wavefront 3D software on the Silicon Graphics Iris system. While at VPB she made several feminist works such as Com- puters Are Fun (with Felicity Coonan), in which "Barbie" meets the mathematics of 3D space, and assisted Jill Scott in her video work Media Massage. But ultimately she found making commercials for mar- garine and the Australian Defence De- partment not particularly meaningful, so she left VPB in 1987 to pursue her own creative work. In 1989 she began teach- ing computers and multimedia at the University of Technology, Sydney, cover- ing matters of society, "subjectivity, gen- der, body, art and technology" [27].
. .AND POPULAR CULTURE
Tom Ellard came to electronic imaging through the family TV-Pong game. He found that when he turned the paddle controls to their extremes, the bats slewed across the screen in disconcerting ways. He spent much of his school days working up new electronic music with a couple of friends in his bedroom using various early synthesizers and tape recorder loops for rhythm machines. This led to the creation of the band Sev- ered Heads, which began in 1978 as an electro-noise band; the band used film loops and Ellard's Atari 800-generated slides as visual backing. His images were "vaguely Oceanic looking masks and stuff" [28], made with the Atari's sym- metry function. He commented that what he was looking for was
a way of generating raw signal and even- tually what I learned to do was to pro- gram in machine language, not in a particularly intelligent way but you see this is sort of like punk: you don't have to know how to play guitar, you don't re- ally have to know how to do machine lan- guage. You've really got to know enough to do a four-bar chord on your personal computer [29].
This he managed with the Com- modore 64, making edgy graphics using character displays and direct manipula- tion of the video-memory, producing ran- domly colored, patterned noise.
I got involved with Severed Heads when I made a demonstration of my video syn- thesizer with them in 1982. I1 subsequently joined the band and used the video syn- thesizer in mixing colorized patterns with off-tape footage. This evolved into video- clip production, and by 1986 the clips were being used as show-backing tapes, augmented with live-mixed colorized pat- tern generation and video feedback, and projected as part of the performance (Fig. 11). It is probable that Severed
Heads was the first band to use live video as part of their performance, with myself playing video synthesizer much as the oth- ers in the band were playing audio syn- thesizer and keyboards.
In 1986 Ellard bought an Amiga 1000, which allowed him to work with bit- mapped graphics. The Amiga displayed 320 X 256 pixels X 32 colors (later ver- sions went to 4,096 colors and higher res- olutions) at video frame rates. Using a technique called "block transfer," in which a region of the screen memory could be moved as a unit or treated as a brush for repetition across the frame or over a sequence of frames, one could grab or draw images, edit them, and do multiple placements and animated se- quences including translations and dis- tortions that could be recorded to videotape. Severed Heads used the Amiga mixed with camera images, video feedback, colorizing and all the options that a vision mixer provided in many of their videos.
The band borrowed a Fairlight CVI in 1986, using it as a generator of patterned background layers of colorized and strobed images. By that time the ex- perience of a Severed Heads show approached that of being in a thunder- storm that rolled over the audience for the hour, leaving everyone thoroughly in- vigorated (Fig. 12).
To CONCLUDE In the late 1980s and certainly in the 1990s the electronic image production process in the commercial TVworld went almost entirely over to Quantel hardware image compositing, while SGI-based soft- ware systems gained ascendancy in the film industry, through AliaslWavefront, Soft-Image and Flame/Inferno. Artistic production came to use digital stills
(through Photoshop) or interactive CD- ROMs, and the Macintosh became the computer of choice for most artists. De- velopments in graphic technologies, along with the fall in the cost of memory, have meant that many of the basic prob- lems that earlier artists suffered in pro- ducing images have now pretty much dissolved. Real-time video synthesis soft- ware is available, and with applications such as Director, performative variability in digital imaging is readily available. The really experimental work now is mostly going on in the rave and dance-party community, with techno music in its var- ious forms as accompaniment, or in web- based art with, for example, VRML.
The signatures of the digital instru- ment, once so obvious, are now almost
194 Jones, Synthetics
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has or has not been manipulated, except when obviously non-photographical en-
tities appear in the film. Naturalism is still not fully successful but it is more a mat-
ter, now, of making the perfect surface
dirty and edgy so that it looks like real
life, not the imaginings of a TV advertis-
ing art director.
References
1. Herbert W. Franke, Computer Graphics-Computer Art (London: Phaidon, 1971).
2. DickJenssen, "On Numerical Forecasting with the Barotropic Model," M.Sc. thesis, Meteorology De- partment, Melbourne University (March 1959).
3. Doug McCann and Peter Thorne, 'The Last of the First, CSIRAC: Australia's First Computer," Depart- ment of Computer Science and Software Engineer- ing, Melbourne University (2000). Web site: <http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/csirac>.
4. G.A. Bird, "The Structure of Rarefied Gas Flows Past Simple Aerodynamic Shapes," Journal of Fluid Mechanics 36, No. 3, 571-576 (1969).
5. Douglas Richardson, presentation at "Synthetics: A History of the Electronically Generated Image in Australia," symposium held at the PowerHouse Mu- seum in Sydney, July 1998, curated by Stephen Jones and produced by Alessio Cavallaro (Sydney: dLux Media Arts, 1998).
6.Jasia Reichardt, ed., Cybernetic Serendipity: The Com- puter and the Arts (London: Studio International, 1968).
7. J.M. Bennett, "Computers and the Visual Arts," Australian ComputerJournal3, No. 4,171-177 (1971).
8. Douglas Richardson, "Computers in the Visual Arts: A Progress Report," internal report for the In- terim Council of the Australian Film & Television School and the Basser Department of Computer Sci- ence, University of Sydney (1972).
9. These included the Computer Composers Exhi- bition, Queensland Festival of the Arts, Brisbane, MIM Building, Brisbane, 1974, and the exhibition A Computer Homage toJosefAlbers, Hogarth Gallery, 17June 1975.
10. Mostek Z80 Microcomputer Devices Technical Man- ual: MK 3880 Central Processing Unit (Mostek Corpo- ration, U.S.A., 1978).
11. Ariel, in "Synthetics" [5].
12.John Hansen, in "Synthetics" [5].
13. Hansen [12].
14. Doug Richardson, Computers and Electronics in the Arts, exh. cat. (Canberra, Australia: Australia '75, 1975), for the exhibition at Australia '75, Canberra, 7-16 March 1975.
15. CJ. Ellyard and I.D.G. Macleod, "The Computer Arts-Reflections on 'Australia '75,"' Proceedings of the Digital Equipment Computer Users Society, Mel- bourne, Australia (August 1975).
16. Ariel [11].
17. See the front cover of Pacific Computer Weekly, 24 October 1980.
Stephen Jones is an Australian video artist. For many years he was the videomaker with the electronic music band Severed Heads. He recently produced the Brain Project web site <http://culture. com. au/brain_proj> on the philosophical aspects of the nature of con- sciousness and artificial life. Jones also builds physical immersion installations based on the incunabula of computing and develops elec- tronic subsystems for many other artists' in- stallations. He is currently researching the
history of the computer arts in Australia.
Jones, Synthetics 195
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