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Copper Giloth on Video Games to Video Art

Copper Giloth is an artist and professor whose earliest work was among the pioneering efforts in the then-nascent field of computer-video art. She speaks with Peter Bauman (Monk Antony) about her late 1970s interventions with early video game systems to make video art and how these experiments shaped her decades-long practice.
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Peter Bauman: You joined the Electronic Visualization Lab [EVL] at the University of Illinois Chicago in 1978 and were the first graduate of their MFA program in 1980. Can you tell us about your decision to join this now-legendary program?

Copper Giloth: I'm just going to start with the point of me deciding, “I think I want to use a computer to work on art making,” which happened when I was an industrial welder at General Dynamics in Quincy, Massachusetts. I was building these LNG tankers. I was in the shipyard and ended up seeing a computer-controlled flame cutter, which is like a plotter but with a flame cutter on it. They were using it to cut the pieces for the ship that I was welding together. I looked at that and said, I want to do that.

So I asked my boyfriend at the time, who was at MIT, who said, “Well, you're going to have to learn to program.” I said, “Okay, I'll think about that.” I went to Africa and I came back and I decided to move to Chicago to learn to program. The easiest thing for me to do was go to University of Illinois Chicago. My first course in programming was in Fortran and it was in the computer department.‍

‍My teacher said I was really good. It was very logical. It fit with how I built sculpture. I also took my first photography course, where I ran into somebody from educational technology who said, “There's this group called the EVL, and you might want to meet them.”‍

‍I went, and they're printing posters for their third Electronic Visualization Event and that's when I met Tom DeFanti, Dan Sandin, Jane Veeder, Phil Morton. And I heard that they were going to start a graduate program. So I applied and was accepted to start graduate school in September of 1978.‍

‍I entered the program right after Larry Cuba had finished the trench scene for Star Wars on the Vector General. I did my first work on that. I modeled how a sculpture would work for my friend, the artist David Morris. I also did the logos for the Circle Women's Liberation Union. Already with the Vector General, my work was related to sculpture and my feminist approach to the world.

Peter Bauman: How long was it before you started working with Zgrass on the Bally Z-Box video game console?

Copper Giloth: When I started, Tom [DeFanti] was only just developing a relationship with Dave Nutting Associates, who were going to ultimately take the Bally video home system and add memory and a keyboard onto it. Tom could then import the Grass language to Zgrass on that little dinky computer, which was a home video game machine.
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‍‍I was there when that was being developed and I was one of the first people to use that, called the Zgrass 32. That's what I ultimately used to make Skippy Peanut Butter Jars, Variance III, Childhood Logic and others.
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Through using that computer, using those systems—video games are fun—that opened up in me the ability to use my humor in making art. 

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‍They got a couple of the 32s working so I was able to take one of them home to my house in my little tiny studio.
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That was a real moment for me: “Like, oh, my gosh, I could sit here and work on this all the time. I don't have to go anywhere.”

Peter Bauman: How long did you keep it?

Copper Giloth: I took it with me when I moved to Massachusetts in 1985. It was a Datamax computer by then with higher resolution, a disk drive, printer and storage. But at EVL I was using the Zgrass 32 and storing my programs on cassette tape. I didn't have a printer.
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My notebooks from then are all filled with me writing my programs out. 

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‍All my work was real time, like Skippy Peanut Butter Jars. There was no editing in those pieces other than sound added afterwards. I had no experience with video before I came to this program. Before, I’d mentioned I was new to programming, too.‍

‍So I had to learn video and programming at the same time because that's what Dan was teaching us. I also had to make a jump in terms of timing.
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That's what was happening there: they were connecting programming to timing.

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‍That made sense to me in the way that you have a musical score, which is also about timing. Mimi Shevitz arriving was also very important. She was a composer. Her sound compositions were what I used for Variance III. Through her compositions, Mimi was voicing what I was thinking about politically and artistically in my works.‍

‍EVL was this hotbed of people to meet and collaborate with who came from very different disciplines. I was the only person who entered that program with a fine arts degree, a BFA in sculpture.
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Peter Bauman: In terms of artistic interventions with video games, your work is some of the earliest; it predates cracktro proto-demoscene work by half a decade.

Video games were just becoming popular at the end of the '70s. Even in their nascent form, arcade  games were mostly shooting-based [Space Invaders (1978),  Asteroids (1979), Galaxian (1979), Defender (1980), Missile Command (1980)]. Today many still are and artistic interventions with video games seem to center subverting those norms with world-building and open-ended exploration.

From the beginning, what was driving you to explore video games as medium?

Copper Giloth: I remember Jane Veeder and I were playing this video game and we were saying:
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“What's really wrong with these games is that you have to shoot and kill everything. We would really like to just wander around in these spaces.”

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‍So we'd get into these video games and we'd try wandering around. But then we would get shot and the game would end. And we'd go, “Okay, let's just start it again, and we'll focus on trying to get over into this area.” There was this disenchantment with that.‍

‍When you look at my early animation, I'm doing the same animation with sprites that they were doing in the early video games. I was moving little pieces of memory around the screen.‍

‍I was using them to tell this story about Skippy Peanut Butter Jars. I'm not shooting anything or eating anything or whatever. I was conscious of that as a way to tell a story from the beginning.

Peter Bauman: You already had that impulse from the beginning to subvert these systems for the artist's own interest. It reminds me of Robbie Barrat’s work today, Big Buck Hunter, where Barrat removed the shooting aspect of the game and you just watch the deer in nice landscapes.

Copper Giloth: That's exactly what Jane and I were interested in but we didn't decide to pursue that. She pursued looking at building landscapes and telling stories out in the West in pieces like Montana. I was influenced, in part because of getting into video with Dan Sandin, by looking at what women artists were doing in the field of video. Martha Rosler was a huge influence for me in the way she told things.‍

‍Video didn’t, in its making of things, directly apply to what I was doing. But the method for making work with a computer and programming the pieces was a good place for me.

Peter Bauman: That place led to your computer video art being show at MoMA in 1982 and another video work was at LACMA’s Digital Witness (2025), but that piece highlights the feminist roots of your video work.

Copper Giloth: I spent a lot of time at that LACMA show, which is really comprehensive. I knew aspects of it all the way through it so found the connections they were making really interesting. I was introduced to other people's work that I didn't know and learned they were dealing with issues that I was dealing with.‍

‍I think the way they structured their catalog was really different than the way they structured the show, because I was paired in a section with Casey Reas. We're both programming but the piece that I had in the show is not about my programming. My piece is a critique of what's going on in this field. What I was feeling as a woman in this field.

Peter Bauman: That piece is a favorite of mine and it’s been referenced in several Le Random articles. We’re talking about Modeling the Female Body - A Survey of Computer Generated Women 1980-1993. Vienna Kim for Le Random describes the piece: “In the video work, the artist observed over 200 hours of SIGGRAPH footage, extracting the moments that included representations of women and stitching them together.” How the women are portrayed is quite jarring.
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Copper Giloth: I had just come to a boiling point where I was tired. When I made this, I was a tenured professor. I'd been around for a while. I'd been making work and was a bit more established.
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But I was tired of the way everybody thought it was okay to make these abusive images of women. 

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‍And it was like nobody ever said anything. And I said, “Well, let's take a look at this.” So I sat down and looked at all the SIGGRAPH video reviews, and I edited out everything of a female body and a male body.‍

‍Then you saw that the female bodies were always these passive figures who were either being sexualized or portrayed violently. And it was like, somebody, I just really need to say this.‍

‍It made a lot of people dislike me for a very long time, maybe still. It went away after 1994 but then it got rediscovered somewhere around 2019. Somebody saw it and went, “You did this 20 years ago?”
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But it hasn't changed.

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‍I can also remember at the time, people were saying, “Copper, why don't you put some analysis on this piece?” And I go, “Why do I need to put an analysis on this piece? Just watch it.”

Peter Bauman: Completely agree; the work speaks for itself. And you saw so much of this firsthand because you also famously chaired the hugely important 1982 and 1983 SIGGRAPH Computer Art shows. The ‘82 show was only the second iteration but in many ways, it was actually the first. They still continue to this day but were massive in showing the world early digital art.

Copper Giloth: Darcy Gerbarg did the first. Most of her show was drawn from the show at the Library of Congress from earlier in 1981. She worked with Ray Lauzzana and they proved that it was feasible.‍

‍Then 1982 was the first official competition where people could submit their work. We had a thousand submissions, which were reviewed by a jury. That's what made '82 distinctive.

Peter Bauman: You had a surprisingly large budget of $70,000 [roughly $250,000 in 2025].

Copper Giloth: We had a serious budget but I also worked for no money. I was a complete volunteer for two years for SIGGRAPH. Each show took a whole year to organize. It took a lot of time. '83 was more complicated because we had opportunities to have the exhibition in France and Japan, too.‍

‍So it really expanded and that was the beginning of the traveling show. In ‘83, there were three exhibitions and they were all slightly different. Detroit was first and biggest but it traveled to ten locations in Europe and Japan. It was a big push. All in all, the '83 show was probably around thirty-five locations. Then that was the end of it for me because I did it for two years, and it was like, “Whoa, that's over.”

Peter Bauman: It sounds exhausting. When you think about this large budget and the show traveling to dozens of locations, it indicates the shows were a success. I’ve spoken to artists from that time and they’ve told me how important, too, the shows were to bringing people together in person and forming a community.

Copper Giloth: The '82 show might have had 75% of the participating artists come to SIGGRAPH in Boston. It was a more affordable thing. A lot of the artists had people they could stay with. It was important to see people there and we were certainly thinking about that when documenting it.‍

‍The documentation came from the influence of Louise Ledeen who said we should really interview these artists. That was something that we were used to doing in Chicago. We were used to videotaping stuff, talking, doing demos. That idea was where I grew up, in a sense, as an artist—that we should talk to the artist and see what they said.‍

‍This was incredible for me because I got to listen to Stan Vanderbeek. I got to listen to Bob Mallary, who I didn't know I would eventually make a whole documentary about. That was why I went to UMass, because he was there. I thought, I'm going to go to someplace that has someone who I respect, who has been making things with computers.‍

‍Those were connections that were formed by meeting those people in these places. I wanted us to look at what artists were doing at this particular time, not on just one topic, but in a much more wide-ranging way. We were much more open to thinking about how artists saw themselves in the artistic process. Our definition was very broad because we were all there and they were interested.



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Copper Giloth is an artist and professor whose projects take the form of drawings, books, animations, videos, websites and installations. Much of her earliest work was among the pioneering efforts in the then nascent field of computer art and computer graphics. She organized the first two international ACM SIGGRAPH Art competitions in 1982 and 1983. Her work has been exhibited in the U.S., Japan, Canada, and across Europe, including at MoMA New York and LACMA.
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‍‍Peter Bauman (Monk Antony) is Le Random's editor in chief.