‍

Jane Veeder on Loving Change

Jane Veeder began her career in electronic media arts in 1976 and became a member of the pioneering Chicago computer graphics community and EVL. Her computer-animation Montana (1982) is part of MoMA's video collection. Veeder spoke with her longtime friend from the Chicago new media scene, Copper Giloth, as well as Peter Bauman. They cover her path from ceramic sculpture to analog video with Phil Morton to real-time computer animation. Veeder's interactive experiments on the Zgrass machine's repurposed video game hardware anticipated by decades the game-engine-driven world-building that now anchors major museum collections and biennials.

‍Copper Giloth: You went to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) in 1975 to study ceramic sculpture, moved into film, and then discovered video by the end of your first year. Can you walk us through those transitions?

‍Jane Veeder: I did ceramic sculpture at the College of Creative Arts in Oakland. After getting my degree, I lived there for around three years. I had my own ceramic setup in the garage of a Victorian house I was renting. I was working at the Berkeley public defender's office as a clerk, doing my artwork on the side.

I decided to make a big change. A friend of mine had done a visiting artist stint at SAIC and wrote me a letter of recommendation. I took the chance to go somewhere new and do graduate work. I love change. So I applied, got in and drove up with my chow chow dog to Chicago.

I started in the ceramics program but was turned off by the senior professor's focus on traditional work, just making pots. Because I'm easily bored, I took an elective in Super 8 filmmaking.

My father had been a professional photographer and ultimately became head of the photo department at Capitol Records. I'd been borrowing cameras from him since I was a child, doing photography on my own.
‍

That filmmaking course inspired me to play with images and with movement. It was like collecting movements.

‍
Then, towards the end of my first year, a man came over to my patio one evening to say hello and he'd recognized me from school. He said, “Have you ever been over to my studio to see all my stuff? I teach at SAIC.”

So I went over and there was the Sandin Image Processor in a huge space with all kinds of video equipment. I thought, “Oh, this is really interesting.” We talked some more and then we kissed. This was the '70s.

Copper Giloth: And that's how you met Phil Morton.

The two of you began collaborating in analog video. How did you evolve from that into digital tools and computers at EVL?

‍Jane Veeder: After that meeting, Phil and I fell in love. We would collaborate for nearly seven years. Every summer, and sometimes during winter or Easter breaks, we'd spend a month or two driving in his weirdly decorated van to the Mountain West or the South, doing video. I was the photographer, the documenter of those trips.

We’d each have videotapes and start editing together at first as we came up with the concept. But all the equipment was Phil’s and he had more time for editing. He would bring the SAIC editing system home from the video department, which he ran as head faculty.

We'd watch the tapes from our travels, make notes, agree on things. Then he would proceed to edit it the way he wanted. It was his text, really. We had a long, non-married relationship. When we finally broke up, it took about twenty minutes to resolve everything. We had totally separate possessions, separate bank accounts—and separate tech.

It was through Phil, who was also heavily involved with EVL and building the Image Processor, that near the end of our time together, we knew all the people at EVL.

Peter Bauman: Do you remember when you decided to get more involved with what was happening at EVL, to come over and learn Zgrass?

‍Jane Veeder: One thing is I was seeing what Copper was doing there.
‍

But I love new things. I love change and I bore very easily.

There was one trigger point: I wanted to go swimming regularly in the Olympic-sized pool at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where EVL is. I needed permission from Tom DeFanti to use the campus facilities. So he signed something, I started swimming, and I also started coming to the grad thesis talks, the ones with visiting artists and non-critiques.

That’s when I decided I wanted to learn Zgrass. I made one whole work there, a digital version of the kind of things Phil and I had done via analog. It was about a mountain we'd visited in Wyoming, now a Native American preserve. There were buffalo that we recorded—how they looked and looked at you.

I wanted to make a story of that mountain and those buffalo on the Zgrass machine. I stayed very late one night finishing it. A very simple little animation. It never got transferred to videotape but there are photographs. And some of those images would make their way to Montana.
‍

‍

Instead of working photographically, as I had been for years, I used Zgrass with the same material. It was the same input, a different process and a different output.

‍
‍Peter Bauman: I’m interested in how these early experiments with computer animation led to your later seminal work, like Montana, which was one of the first computer-animated works acquired by MoMA. But how did the two of you meet?

Copper Giloth: Jane and I met in the spring of 1978 when one of our friends said, “Hey, you should come meet these EVL people.” It was before I was a grad student there. He invited us to one of their three Electronic Visualization Events. I was just this student at University of Illinois taking computer science courses, learning to program. I met Jane at the event and were both incredibly bored with the images on their poster. It was all green and you couldn’t really read it. Jane knew everyone through Phil and they all talked to me and encouraged me to enter the grad program. And I did, entering in the fall of 1978.

As a student at EVL, we would have weekly seminars with professors from SAIC and students from different art and computer sciences courses. Phil Morton would attend those and that’s where Jane and I got to know each other.

At that time, there was a very strong connection between the video area at SAIC and EVL. At SAIC, at the same time, there was also an Art and Technology department where Joan Truckenbrod was. But it was different from Phil’s video. Phil Morton and Dan Sandin had a strong connection because of the Sandin Image Processor.

It was all these tools and connections between people that made it such a rich environment. Then Jane came in, which made it even better.
‍

‍

Peter Bauman: How were you both rethinking video games and real-time animation at EVL, making interactive work that didn't center violence or points, like Jane's Warpitout and Vizgame?

Copper Giloth: The Zgrass was built on the hardware of the Bally Arcade, the same system Dave Nutting Associates used to develop several Bally/Midway games. Tom DeFanti at EVL took that machine, added memory and a keyboard, and ported his GRASS language from the PDP-11 to create Zgrass, named for its Z80 processor.

Here was now this rich programming language, which was like BASIC but really focused on graphics commands. Unlike the Apple or the early PC, it had custom chips for fast sprite animation, which meant we could work in real time.

This programming language allowed us to do simple but fast GIF-like animations of sixteen frames. You can see that in my work, but you can really see that very clearly in the way that Montana is constructed.

Jane’s Montana and my own piece, Skippy Peanut Butter Jars, both ran in real time, which other artists working on lower-end systems couldn't do without editing frame by frame on film.

Jane also did Warpitout. One of the things that both Jane and I were doing was developing our own tools to make stuff. We'd make our own custom paint programs, for example. And Warpitout came out of that. Some of those tools and images you can see in Montana because both Montana and Warpitout were shown at SIGGRAPH '82. They were built out of Jane's software that she developed on Zgrass.

‍Jane Veeder: I started using the small tools I developed on the UV-1 to make drawings of the buffalo and the mountain, writing short programs that allowed parallel processing. Certain events in Montana happen simultaneously, with an overall program calling each one in turn.

Each animation is at most sixteen frames and you can move them, apply different operations and have them intersect with XOR or by layering one in front of another.
‍

‍
‍
The whole field of digital graphics was just starting to get going. I enjoy thinking structurally and in terms of progression. That was a huge foundation.

‍Peter Bauman: What inspired the interactive element of works like Warpitout, giving viewers something other than a conventional game or static video experience?

Jane Veeder: I loved working with computer graphics because when you interface with computers, they respond to you. I wanted to take that and work with it.

I'd get these little animations going, feel the motion and think, “Oh, this one needs to change; maybe that looks better with this one.” You get instant feedback. If we had to deal with the world with our hands tied and one eye covered, we'd have a totally different experience of it. I would develop these little routines, little entities, each with a kind of animated gesture cycle.
With Warpitout, people were always interested in their own faces. The idea was that you'd stand in front of it, take a photo of yourself and your image would be input. You could then work with your own image, which was a real way to pull people into the interactive experience.

Copper Giloth: We were around video game companies and trying out their new games.
‍

Jane and I were both always trying to explore the environments. But we'd always get shot because they were all point-and-shoot. We kept wondering, why shouldn't you be able to just explore?

Peter Bauman: After EVL, while you were both still in Chicago, you even worked together?

Copper Giloth: After Jane left Phil, we ended up living in the same building. We were both working at a company called Real Time Design, doing interface design for the early video game company I mentioned earlier, Dave Nutting Associates, the people behind the Bally Arcade.

Tom DeFanti spun the project out of the university with some of his former graduate students and with outside financial support from Dave Nutting Associates. The initial goal was to further develop the Zgrass UV-1 computer and expand the Zgrass programming language into a new version called RT1. One of the later projects was to implement a new, very compact method for compressing color so the machine could work with 256 colors.

Everything we'd been doing on the Zgrass machines up to that point was four-color, all of Jane's work and all of mine, except my very earliest piece, Skippy Peanut Butter Jars, which was two. We were programming simulations on Zgrass machines to work out how the color would behave.

The larger ambition was to produce a machine that could compete with the Apple by doing graphics much faster, using the same video game chips that made our real-time work possible. It never became commercially viable for a variety of reasons but the concept carried forward in other computers.

I eventually went lower-end and moved to the Amiga; Jane went higher-end. But while we were in Chicago, we were both supporting ourselves using the UV-1 Zgrass machine. Jane ended up with her own UV-1 machine.
‍

‍
‍

‍
The same real-time capability made interactive work possible, like Jane's Warpitout, which grew partly out of the tools she'd developed for Montana.
‍
Also before leaving Chicago, Jane and I produced an article called The Paint Problem. There was a lot of press at the time claiming that the paint program was revolutionizing art-making. But after years of writing our own software and building interactive environments, we were both completely offended by that idea.

Peter Bauman: What excited you about building your own digital tools?

Jane Veeder: They had a few practical advantages, like you could erase.
‍

But digital, to me, translates into something that eats everything. It expands, opens things up. Paint programs just seemed like going backwards.

‍
Some people are very happy to be in their little space even if that space disappears or no one's interested in it anymore. People are still painting. That's fine with me.

Peter Bauman: After Chicago, how did your career develop?

Jane Veeder: After a one-year position in Portland, Oregon, where I'd been brought in to start computer graphics coursework, with little Apple machines, they told me my salary was going to drop by half. I couldn't live on that. So I moved to Santa Barbara to work at Wavefront. It was brief and intense. My job was to teach people to use the software but we only had one week.

Then I heard about a position at San Francisco State. The dean at the time was August Coppola, Francis Ford Coppola's brother. He believed computer animation was going to be a major thing; his brother had told him so. The art department didn't want to touch it so he created a separate department but it was all lecturers with no tenure. At SIGGRAPH that summer, a mutual friend, Louise Ledeen, knew about the position and recommended me for it. I got it and taught there for around thirty years.

At one point, I took a leave to work at Atari. August Coppola had left and the school had decided to fold the program. I needed to figure out what came next. My title at Atari was director of an area covering the animators and art directors, everything except sound and coding. I worked there for a year. It was a corporation so what can I say? Then I went back to San Francisco State and Atari folded a few years later.

Copper Giloth: When you came back to San Francisco State after Atari, you took on a very heavy teaching load. What drove you during those years?

Jane Veeder: I just kept looking for new things. Every few years there would be a new technology. But technology not only comes, it goes. Sometimes a new company would come out with new hardware or software nobody had ever done before. And then sometimes as short as three years later, it's all gone. So you just had to get a new look around, figure out what were the new ideas, and try to work with the people building on them.

I would always talk to developers at SIGGRAPH who were coming out with new software. They'd say, "Sure, we'll give it to you for your school machines and your students." So most of the software I was teaching with, I was also getting for the students. Sometimes the lab was just one high-end 3D animation machine that didn't last all that long, but that relationship with the people making the tools kept everything moving forward.

‍Copper Giloth: We’ve long agreed on that. That it was very useful to teach students how to keep learning new software. That they should always be thinking about which strategies best fit their own learning. Because whatever they learned was probably not going to be there in five years.

Jane Veeder: My class structure after my first few years, especially once I moved out of the high-end, Disney-level 3D animation work and into new software with new graphics capabilities on cheaper machines. By that point students had their own computers and it wasn't just my SGI sitting in a room on campus.

I could get the software to all of them and the people who made it knew that and wanted to see what the students would do with it. So it was a whole different context to teach within.

If they're ever going to have a job in an industry, that's going to be their life. And if you just focus on the technology, what the software does, if every week we say, "Now do something with this feature," then later on they've forgotten it all.

One of my favorite projects was one of their first. I sent them out to photograph a graffiti-filled alley in San Francisco. The first week was just the walk itself. You go, you take a picture. When something looks interesting, you take another. And another. Then you take something that connotes the end of the walk. So from the very beginning, you're always dealing with the whole project as a whole environment.

Copper Giloth: And because they actually created something, they could go back and develop it further as they learned more. What they were holding onto was the art, not how much they knew about the technology.

Jane Veeder: And they weren't overwhelmed.

Copper Giloth: I always enjoyed talking with you about each new technology you had to deal with. But there was always this stage of, "Well, this is ending, so now we're going to try this piece of software."

‍Jane Veeder: Oh, you know the stuff you're doing? It's not selling the way it once did. So we're going to turn and go in a different direction.

You have to do that. And it's more fun.



------



Jane Veeder is a new media artist who began her career in electronic media arts in 1976, becoming a core member of the pioneering Chicago computer graphics community. Her 1982 animation MONTANA entered MoMA's inaugural video collection. WARPITOUT (1984), an interactive self-portrait game, went on permanent exhibit at the Ontario Science Centre, while Ars Electronica commissioned 4KTAPE in 1985. Since 1988 Veeder has taught 3D animation, interactive multimedia and virtual world design at San Francisco State University.

‍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.
‍‍
Peter Bauman (Monk Antony) is Le Random's editor in chief.