VIS 159

Early CGI/1960s “Art + Technology”: Bell Labs

Who were the artists/engineers working there? How did they work together? BEFLIX.

Artists working at Bell Labs:

• Ken Knowlton

• Max Mathews

E.A.T.  What did they do? What was their famous event series? What other group did they overlap with?

1st gen CGI artists: Stan VanDerBeek. John Whitney. Lillian Schwartz.  Major works, approaches,  and interests. Ken Knowlton

Analog vs. digital computer animation.  What did John Whitney develop, and how?

2nd gen  CGI artists: Larry Cuba. Copper Giloth. 

Major works, approaches,  and interests.

Hollywood connections:
Which artists worked on Vertigo and Star Wars. Who had a color organ in a feature film?

Visual performance history: Magic lanterns, phantasmagoria, color organs, light shows.

Thomas Wilfred, Father Castel,  Scriabin’s Prometheus, Single Wing Turquoise Bird.

Tape music/musique concrète, audio synthesizers. Understanding the relationship.

Synth history: (analog audio) Buchla, Moog. Understand the trajectory from earlier patch-based programming + tape music to the development of analog audio synths.

 (analog video) Dan Sandin’s IP.  Sandin/Morton: open source ethos. Understand the basic trajectory of visual performance history.  Understanding the limitations of pre-digital visual performance in general.

(digital) Contemporary patch-based audiovisual programming languages – understand that these are directly descended from their physical counterparts (analog synths) and visual performance history.

Grau reading: understanding the relationship between topics (automata, telepresence, and VR.)  Understanding the  relationship to the body.  Understanding major pre-electronic examples Grau cites (e.g. mirrors and voodoo dolls, frescoes, etc)

More telepresence prehistory:
Major 19th and 20th century speculative/sci-fi ideas about telepresence: images over telephones (i.e. video chat).

Movie-Drome as a precursor to later telepresence art. (Be familiar with how  Movie-Drome was intended to work (satellites), if it had made it past the prototype.)

Satellite art: Kit Galloway & Sherrie Rabinowitz (A Hole in Space, Satellite Arts Project) Paik: Good Morning, Mr. Orwell

Telerobotics: Eduardo Kac, Ken Goldberg’s Telegarden

Robots & Cyborgs: Stelarc. ELIZA, Harold Cohen [AARON] .
Cybernetics. Metropolis.  RUR. The Westinghouse robots. Drawing machines: Tinguely (Metamatics), Kanayama. Schöffer: CYSP-1. Social perceptions of robots over the years. (Robot as creation, servant, threat.) Robots and authorship.  Basic early history: How far back do robots go?. 

Virtual/artificial realities:

Be familiar with the basic predigital prehistories, as discussed in Grau:  Frescoes and panoramas. Immersive large scale dioramas. 

Myron Krueger [Videoplace], Stereoscopic viewers, flight simulators, Ivan Sutherland / Bob Sproull: Sword of Damocles. Morton Heilig: Sensorama. Hugo Gernsback’s Teleyeglasses (what they were and weren’t.)

For all artists / developers / etc:
What social, political, cultural, ethical or formal concerns/interests did they explore or address in their work?  (If we discussed it in lecture)

Major topics to focus on: Movie-Drome, Good Morning, Mr. Orwell (understand these thoroughly.) John Whitney vs. the Bell Labs approaches. Harold Cohen’s AARON vs other “drawing machine” art. Authorship. The labor / automation debates around early robots. Philosophies and ethos (see above.)