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Peter Bauman: Hello everybody and welcome to this Le Random panel celebrating Chapter Six of our generative art timeline, covering the decade of the 1980s. I'm your host, Peter Bauman or Monk Antony. I'm the content person at Le Random, and my co-host today is Conrad House, Nemo Keck, from Le Random. And joining us today are some of the most prominent figures in digital art whose careers overlapped with the decade of the 1980s. We are incredibly fortunate and humbled to welcome Darcy Gerbarg, Copper Giloth, David Em, Mark Wilson, Dan Sandin, William Latham, Stephen Todd and Jeff Davis.
Today is again all about the decade of the 1980s and generative art, but we're taking a more generous view today, more digital art and its predecessors. At Le Random I've been writing a generative art timeline, and Conrad has been invaluable helping with several tasks and including images. And this timeline goes back 70,000 years into pre-modern history with Chapter One.
And then they will have a little time to say a few words about themselves. Let's start with Darcy. Darcy is a pioneer digital artist who organized and curated the first SIGGRAPH computer art exhibits in the early '80s. She now creates work using both the latest digital technologies and traditional fine art techniques. Darcy, thank you so much for joining us. Would you like to say anything more about yourself and your work?
Darcy Gerbarg: I don't really think of myself as a generative artist, and I never thought that the program was more important than what you saw as the piece of art. And this has been a long time discussion in the computer graphics field.
Of course, I use software that has been written by really brilliant and early pioneers. Some of it was custom, some of it was not products that were available to buy. And today, of course, particularly Photoshop really changed a lot of things. And that kind of happened in the mid '80s. I'd say when Adobe got that software and started with Photoshop, it changed a lot of things. And also more color became available in the mid '80s on PC level computers. Until then, you really only had eight bits of color. You only had maybe 16 bits of color, so you only had a few different colors.
I had a unique experience, maybe. I came out of the art world in New York. All the people I knew were color field painters, abstract expressionist painters. They were showing in leading galleries and having exhibits in major museums and things like that. And I really wanted to find out what the leading technology was for my generation. And I knew about digital audio. I knew about electronic music, and I thought there had to be something comparable for the visual arts. So I went to the art library in New York City and found some things. In particular, I came across Ruth Leavitt's book, which was really interesting. And I tried to contact each of the artists in that book, and I did contact quite a few of them. At that time, I really didn't know anything about digital art or the community or who was doing anything anywhere, but I got involved very quickly. But I still always thought of myself as a painter.
I was fortunate. The first computer tools I used to make art, the first tool I used, was Alvy Ray Smith's paint system, and it was 24 bits of color, it was full color. And I never wanted to go back to learning how to program eight bits of color or something. I wasn't interested in just having lines drawn. There were no good printers at those times. So I then spent, and still spend, a lot of my time in my practice figuring out how to take these digital images that I've created on the computer and get into a physical medium.
I also, unlike Dan and Copper and quite a few of the artists working in the field, did not feel that motion and animation, moving images, were the whole story. I was a painter. I thought of myself as a painter. I wanted pictures, paintings, big ones, wall size if possible.
Peter Bauman: Yeah, that's something that we would love to get into a little bit further. That's a really interesting topic actually. Maybe we can move on, sorry, to Copper. Copper Giloth is a pioneering digital artist and professor. In 1980, she was the first graduate of the MFA program at the Electronic Visualization Lab at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Much of her early work was among the pioneering efforts in the nascent field of computer art and graphics. She chaired SIGGRAPH art show competitions in 1982 and 1983 that traveled all over the world.
So Copper, you are really one of my heroes because you've been such a documenter of the space. You've been a very valuable person to me, and I think that's really, really valuable for me. So really, truly, it's a pleasure to have you. Can you please tell us a bit more about yourself?
Copper Giloth: I want to give sort of a context history. I think the first thing I'll say is that when I was a little girl, my father was working for Bell Labs, and I can remember him taking me to see the introduction of the laser and saying, this is going to be important. And I saw Bob Mallary, who is an important artist, and I saw his work at the 1964 World's Fair.
And then I just grew up and I got a degree in sculpture. But in 1978, or 1979, I completed my first digital animation using a Bally video game system configured with Tom DeFanti's Z-Grass programming language. I programmed the piece, I saved it on an audio cassette tape and outputted the animation to video. This was, oh, there's a picture of it. Dan's ready for me.
Within two years, these programs had evolved into an interactive symmetry drawing installation with the help of my friends and colleagues. And that was exhibited in the fall of 1980 at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. I sort of felt like, wow, I'm real. This fall, some of the work I made during this period and in the '90s will be documented again in the LACMA Digital Witness exhibition. So that's where I am now.
Peter Bauman: Amazing, yeah, thank you, Copper. And we can move on to Mark now. Mark is an American artist, author and programmer who was part of the 1980s movement of artist programmers at the forefront of the use of computer software. Mark was the first artist to create art. In the early '80s, Mark purchased a microcomputer and began to learn programming after training as a traditional artist. He has also widely exhibited around the world, including in the permanent collection of the V&A, and has been exhibited at prestigious shows and in the history of the American art world. Mark, could you please introduce yourself a bit more and tell us a bit more about your journey?
Mark Wilson: Thank you, Peter, and greetings to all of my fellow panelists. I was telling my son about this event, and he said, "Legends of the '80s," it sounds like some kind of rock revival concert. And I assured him that it was not.
Anyway, to give a brief summary of my career, I started as a fine artist, went to art school, didn't know anything about computers, computer graphics, mathematics. Your typical artist pushing paint around on canvas. And as my work evolved, it became kind of technologically based. I made drawings and paintings that were somewhat reminiscent of architectural drawings, engineering drawings, electronic diagrams. So I was predisposed to an interest in computers.
And I think that one of the most important aspects of the whole '80s in terms of its relevance to art making is the explosion of the personal computers, beginning with the TRS-80s, Trash-80s, and Apples in the late '70s, and then moving on to IBM PCs. In this sort of context I was fascinated with computers, and I went out and bought one in 1980. I got it home and I thought it was absolutely wonderful, but I didn't have the faintest idea of how I was going to use it to make art. I knew there were a lot of paint programs out, but they didn't really interest me very much. And then I started playing around with the computer and I discovered that computer programming, while somewhat intimidating, turned out to be a very natural way for a visual artist to construct images.
So I began programming, and initially it was very rudimentary stuff. And as we all know, computers are wonderful for crunching numbers, but there is no inherent way to make pictures with computers, and that has always been a problem. It exists today just as much as it did 40 years ago. But there were these machines, these simple machines called pen plotters, and the pen plotters produced physical art objects that were very similar to some of the work that I had done earlier, very linear images. So I bought a small pen plotter, and my work has really evolved from that point. And my software is still relatively simple software, but it has evolved over the years, and I've found it capable of producing a nice variety of different styles and imagery.
And the other thing I wanted to mention about the '80s is that I think I've met some of you at SIGGRAPH. I certainly know Copper and Darcy. And SIGGRAPH was a wonderful institution, is a wonderful institution, because it started out very early with the art show. And the art shows were really wonderful in terms of offering artists a chance to see other artists' work and to exhibit their own work. And it served as an important forum, I think, for all of us, as a way to increase our knowledge and stimulate our ideas about art making.
Peter Bauman: Yeah, I think that's a really good point, how important those early SIGGRAPH shows are and were. And that's why, I mean, I can't believe how fortunate we are to have both Copper and Darcy here today.
“And as we all know, computers are wonderful for crunching numbers, but there is no inherent way to make pictures with computers, and that has always been a problem.” — Mark Wilson 11:37
Let's continue with the introductions. The next person who, again, I cannot believe is here, is David Em, also originally a painter. David is a digital art pioneer known for his early work with pixels and groundbreaking creations at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, or JPL. His innovative contributions have been internationally recognized and exhibited in museums worldwide. So, David, thank you so much for joining us. Can you briefly say hi and tell us a little more about yourself?
David Em: Sure. Well, hello to everybody. And it's an honor to be here with all you guys. It is bringing back the '80s. Not quite putting the band back together, but it really has been a lot of history that a lot of us have shared.
And so, a little about myself. I started, like some others here, as a painter, art background. And then when I was 22, in 1975, I wound up at Xerox Research Park and saw pixels for the first time. Pixel was not part of my vocabulary. The word digital was not part of my vocabulary. I really didn't know that any of this world existed. I'd been working for about a year in a studio in San Francisco doing analog video synthesis. And so the idea of artists and machines working together was very much something I was pursuing.
And give a shout out here to Dan. Dan, you were a very early inspiration to me, as somebody who had really put those two things together. And what Nam June Paik was doing. So this was all still in the analog world. But it was, yeah, there's electronic information out there, and we as artists in this generation, this is the time to really jump on that. So I got it immediately. And I saw this is the future of art. Why other people didn't see it at the time is beyond me to this day, but it was clear to me. And that started a long journey that took me to JPL, took me a lot of other places.
But since we're talking about the '80s, that was, I think, a very important transitional period of time for the entire medium. For all of us as individuals. And also in the larger, really sociocultural aspect of human consciousness. Because it's hard to think of it from the point of view that we're at today. But just as I had never heard the word digital, neither had anybody else. Outside of a few hundred practitioners on the entire planet, this was unknown territory. And so what happened in the '80s through SIGGRAPH, what Darcy and Copper did with those early shows, was so important in terms of exposing to the world that this stuff existed at all.
And so it was during that period really, you could say from about, I think, 1981, which is, I think, Darcy, when that first show that you did happened. Up until, let's say, 1990, a whole bunch of things happened, one right after the other. And a couple of people mentioned personal computers. Like, yeah, right. I started working with a mainframe at Triple-I. I was working on a DEC-10 in 1976. By 1990, I was working on a Mac IIfx in my own studio. That is an incredible revolution. It's a great thing to have happened in a 10-year span of time.
And so there was that. The fact that we went from no such thing as commercial software to where that was just something that you could go out, you could buy a computer and you could buy software to put on it. That was so radical. I have like a thousand stories. I won't get into them now. But one I'm just remembering, and thinking of SIGGRAPH: SIGGRAPH sponsored an event. I don't remember when it was. Maybe 1983-ish, at Caltech. And it was sponsored by National SIGGRAPH. A whole bunch of really great people came. And afterwards, some of us went out to dinner. And we were walking up Lake Street in Pasadena. It was about 11 o'clock at night. I think I was maybe with Jim Blinn, Jim Kajiya, maybe Vibeke Sorensen was there, maybe Ed Emshwiller. Just a small group of us. And we walked by an Egghead Software, which none of us had seen before. And we all just stopped and looked at that store and said, this is a store that sells nothing but software. And we all just burst into hysterical laughter. We could not believe what we were looking at.
It was the revolution of the '80s in a nutshell to me, as we went from a place where it only existed in these institutions that you had to get access to, to the point where you could walk down Lake Street, walk in a store and buy a paint program. Mind blowing. So that's the transition as I see it. And then on to today, where these days I'm just, like the last couple years, deeply immersed in AI. We're living on another planet now, especially in terms of generative art, which is your guys' focus a lot.
Peter Bauman: Well, thank you so much for that wonderful context. Yeah, when you put it that way, when you start at the beginning and look at the end, maybe we can do that a bit more later. It is such a remarkable stretch of time, and so happy to get to bring it to the fore and celebrate it today.
But the next person I'll introduce is William Latham. He is a pioneering figure in generative art who revolutionized the field with his Mutator evolutionary art, which he developed at IBM in the late '80s. His work, characterized by organic forms generated through innovative software, garnered international acclaim and has been exhibited globally as well. Then he transitioned to rave music and game development, and his boundary pushing creations continue to captivate audiences in those fields and to today. So William, thank you so much for joining us. Can you tell us a bit more about yourself?
William Latham: Okay, so fantastic to be on the panel with everyone. I guess with the '80s, my entry point is 1987, when, age 25, I became an IBM research fellow for the next six years at their scientific centre in Winchester in the South of England. And there I started my collaboration with Stephen Todd, talking in a minute. And I guess through IBM I got access to big IBM mainframe computers. And from an early age...
...applying it to organic and strange forms. So these strange sort of forms kind of lurk out of the darkness. And in particular, working with Steve, I got access to a CSG renderer, which you can do boolean operations, which is very nice for kind of sculptural effects. And then we were able to develop this FormGrow language in ESME, which enabled us to evolve organic forms that were taking, stealing geometry from nature, and we'd re-implemented in FormGrow. So I had the luxury of being able to craft my own software. And that's a philosophy that I've maintained ever since.
SIGGRAPH definitely was important. We showed sequence and evolution of forms. I was at SIGGRAPH in Dallas, and it was just a fantastic event. And the art show I first showed in 1987 was brilliant. But yeah, so I'm quite late in the '80s, capitalizing on everything that everyone's done. Definitely great meeting David. Transjovian Pipeline, 1979, was one of the reasons why I got interested in computers. The colors, I love the colors, the textures. So I guess I've capitalized on all the hard work that's gone before. And the longer term collaboration with Stephen is still going on.
Later on, my slight challenge as an artist now is people like the old stuff. Do they like the new stuff as much? You feel like you're competing a bit with yourself. So I've been doing a lot of black and white work at the moment. It seems to be going down really well in China. So I'm doing a lot in China at the moment. And I've had a lot of fun in VR. So that's probably, I've gone over time, but I'll pass you back.
Peter Bauman: Well, yeah, thank you so much, William. And I think it's a really good point that we have so many different people here today and their careers overlap with the '80s in lots of different interesting ways. And I think let's move on to Stephen, and then we'll look at Dan and Jeff.
Stephen was a key collaborator. He still is a key collaborator. He's a great collaborator with William. He co-developed the groundbreaking Mutator evolutionary art system with William at IBM in the late '80s. And their innovative, alternative evolutionary software system has been paving the way for intricate 3D forms that are now ubiquitous. So Stephen, again, thank you so much for joining us. And can you please tell us a bit more about yourself? What a pleasure to have you.
Stephen Todd: I came from a maths and then computing background, actually beginning in database as my main thing. And then in the early '70s, sorry, the early '80s, we were doing a lot of data visualization, working with scientists and molecular graphics, which in fact we're still doing, even with some of the people who we originally worked with back in the '80s. And that meant we put together both geometric program, easy geometric programming. It was based on data analytics and high quality computer graphics based on CSG, but also, as William said, totally relying on lots of the stuff that had gone before for making it better, realistic. And then our manager suggested this was all quite fun. It would be... He met William. When did you meet Peter Quarendon, William?
William Latham: In 1986.
Stephen Todd: Yeah. It was his choice. To the lab, and we had the right programming environment, hardware environment and so on. Still very limited. One of my favourite quick stories is we were limited to eight bits, not eight bits per channel but eight bits total for the color. So we got quite good at reducing down and really optimizing the error diffusion and stuff. And at our first exhibition somebody was looking at the prints, looking at all the very fine-grained texture you get as a result of that, and said, I really like the way you've got this lovely texture. And just, sort of, we don't have that anymore. We're doing it all in eight bits or more.
Peter Bauman: How wonderful that you did end up rekindling that collaboration, Stephen. And we can move on to Dan now. Dan Sandin is a globally renowned pioneer of electronic art and visualization. His work has led his professional career, in his professional years... of the legendary EVL, the Electronic Visualization Lab, and professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, with Cochart. From his groundbreaking work on scientific visualization to creations like the Sandin Image Processor and his visionary work on virtual reality theaters like the CAVE, his contributions have earned him acclaim and support at prestigious institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art. So, wow, Dan, what an absolute honor and privilege to have you, sir. Thank you very much. Could you please tell us a bit more about yourself?
Dan Sandin: Thank you very much for that introduction. I'm famous for not unmuting when I start talking in the circles of my video conferencing. So behind me is a computer. It's an analog computer that processes video images in real time. And that was really from the early '70s.
In the '80s, we, first of all, I'd like to say that I've constantly worked with Tom DeFanti in doing all of this stuff. And we ran an operation which generated hardware for artists to use and software for artists to use. And we were supportive and part of the process of a very rich artist community in Chicago that did an amazing amount of work.
So this is an early Woody box. Sorry, the framing is not great. And that was a device that could produce animation. It could hold 16 frames, but you could do these additive animations where you'd start with something and then keep adding it. This is a frame from Jane Veeder's work. And this was a case where this part went through a nice cycle of walking, and then other stuff was added and changed and onto videotape. But that was the beginning of the '80s. The machines looked like this, and the graphic qualities kind of looked like that.
At the end of the '80s, when I was working in this area, this was a desk side supercomputer, which now would be thought of as a GPU, and producing work of many more flexible graphic qualities. You have shadows, you have highlights, you have rich imagery. But I must say, when I look at this work by Jane Veeder, I'm completely amazed by it every time I watch it. And it's a similar length work to this one. Now, of course, I think this is a great piece of work too, but both of them give me the same kind of wow factor and just that "that's an amazing piece of work" feeling, from across all of those technological steps.
Peter Bauman: Yeah, that's incredible. And I asked Jane to join us. Unfortunately, she wasn't able to. What a demonstration again of the changes throughout the decades. Thank you, Dan.
And we have our introductions. We're gonna wrap these up with another unbelievable guest who's joining us today, and that is Jeff Davis. He's an artist, an AI researcher at the University of the Arts, London. He explores the ethical dimensions of computer generated art. He's got a diverse background in electronic arts, psychology and counseling. Davis is also an innovator and educator. He founded Story Software and Micro Arts, and he is a friend of Le Random. He is helping to contribute to the timeline that we're celebrating and we're talking about today. And he is also just a great artist. We'd like to extend a warm welcome to Jeff for joining us. So thank you, Jeff. Would you like to say a bit more about yourself?
Jeff Davis: Yeah, sure. Hello everyone. It's great to be here this evening. It's actually after midnight where I am, which is great. So basically I had a background in, my university degree was in psychology, but at the time I had a band, a musical band, and we used to do mixed media shows. So I was quite used to working with quite a lot of old fashioned, very heavy video decks, which I think were U-matic at the time, and processing images and whatnot with music.
So after university, I moved to London and got involved with the art scene there, which was London Video Arts, and also mainly the London Filmmakers' Co-op, which was quite a lively scene. And there was all art. There was no money involved. It was all structuralist film. There were people like Stan Brakhage who were very popular, and you'd watch some abstract film for like an hour, and that would be entertainment. So it was very, very abstract, very hardcore kind of image-based scene with sound. There'd always be some soundtracks. I did a bit of work there.
Now, to pay my way in those days after university, I didn't go into psychology. I got a job as a commercial programmer. So I was programming on mainframes to start with, the Univac 1100, quite a famous machine. We used to write the code with a pencil and then get it edited by people. And we'd get the printouts back with the corrections on, and we could cycle through that. We didn't even see a monitor until several of these sort of editing phases had gone through. And we hardly ever saw the computer, because of course it was in a different room. But eventually I didn't, I really liked that kind of work. I was coding COBOL, which is a business language for a big organization. It's great, but not really me. So I went abroad, got published, writing some fiction. So I was in a kind of arty mood.
And then the microcomputer came in. It came out in about '84. And this was this incredible machine, a Sinclair Spectrum, which is literally as big as a paperback. And I was so used to working with really big machines that this thing was like this incredible toy that I could just code anything I wanted. And the whole machine was in that little box. You could plug it into a TV set, which was another big factor in the accessibility. You only had to buy basically the computer, and then you didn't have to buy a monitor.
So all these things were going on. I thought, well, I know about London Video Arts, and I know about the London Filmmakers' Co-op. So I thought I'd set up a computer equivalent with Micro Arts. So that's how Micro Arts, that was the inspiration. And I knew a lot of people doing similar things, working with video or film, sound. So we put together this whole project. And I actually programmed most of it myself. So I did a lot of generative art, which I did because I was a programmer. So it was very natural for me to code, properly code with bits and bytes, some actual graphics. So I did a whole series of graphics pieces, I did a text generator.
I don't know whether anybody's heard of Geert Bak in this crowd. He's a curator, but he said that the text generator was an early version of ChatGPT, which might be overstating it, but it was 1985. So this was quite a while ago, a story generator program came out through Micro Arts.
And eventually, it didn't really... we were posting data sets. Somebody mentioned data sets. We were posting tapes to people, and it was quite a community going on, but it wasn't really making any money. So Prestel, which was Teletext, asked us to put all of our material on their early networking system. So we put the whole lot onto Prestel in the UK. And I think in Canada, America, there's another one, but Minitel was the one that was in Europe. So this was a pre-internet sort of networking bulletin board system that came out through TV signals, and you just have a modem and get it off your TV signal. So that was all kind of networking.
Now, in terms of tech, very, very briefly, I know I'm going on a bit. The '80s for me was mainframes, where you wrote in with a pencil, and then this whole weird system, doing big programs. Then I worked on some minis, VAX minis I worked on for a while. Then the microcomputer. But by the end, by 1988, I was working in an art college in Sheffield, back to Sheffield, and they had Apollo workstations, which were sort of state of the art graphic machines, just like modern machines now, really, just that the backups weren't as easy to do and stuff like that. We were doing 3D animation, surface modeling, solid modeling. We had SDRC IDEAS, which is what they modeled the space shuttle on. And all this was '88. That all happened so quickly, eight years, nine years.
So the gear we had at Sheffield at the end of the decade was just revolutionary. And that was mainly the hardware changes that came in. That's what fueled the software changes. There was such a big expansion in hardware in that period. So, I mean, I think you mentioned about it being like a medieval period, where people were holding the flame, but I don't know. I think it actually did change. I think one quick point about AI, we're in a similar period now, I'd say. So many changes are gonna happen around now and onwards.
Conrad House: Thank you so much for the introductions from everybody, and apologies if it ran a bit longer, but I think it's really nice that we get kind of these anecdotal references from each and every one of you. It's very rich in of itself. It's probably more important than any questions Peter and I could come up with. But I think we could probably start with maybe one broad question that we can kind of just ask the crowd. If anybody wants to jump in, feel free to unmute yourself to talk about it.
But it's been something that we've kind of referenced already, especially David, in talking about how in the early '80s we had these very large mainframe computers where you weren't even in the same room as the computer necessarily. And then we get to the late '80s, '89, '88, where we have very personalized PCs that are pretty accessible in terms of hardware and software development. Because something we talk about a lot in the '60s and '70s is this natural public stigma against kind of computer art, art and computers in general, with this overbearing machine that in some ways felt very scary to a lot of people. Does anyone maybe want to expand on how the stigmas of machines or this fear against machines changed in the '80s?
David Em: Sure. This is a topic I've certainly thought about, experienced firsthand. I'll bet everybody here has as well. From my own personal perspective, I might have mentioned this when I was talking about Xerox, I couldn't believe that everyone didn't see it, how obvious it was that this was going to change everything. But the word that you use, scary: people were scared in those days. It's very difficult today to understand the mindset of the international world culture coming out of the '60s into the '70s. There was the whole thing about the bomb, technology was going to come out and crush your consciousness, mash your toes, IBM is evil, they're out to get you. And yet there was also this love affair with technology that was going on. Electric guitars, Buddy Holly, the first steps on the moon, NASA. So people were like jazzed, and they were freaked at the same time, and didn't quite know where things were going to fall.
And so when these images, and also music, came out at this time, it turned the consciousness of what was going on, of like, hey, wow, the computers can actually be cool, it's a creative device. And so that was a huge mindset, and I think the general public was completely open to it. And so I got to experience that. A lot of my images have been credited with helping people see that this was a door opening, not a horrible medieval grate that was gonna mash and kill and do horrible things. So that was one really big aspect of it.
The other thing was, and other people may have comments about this, was the art world, unlike the general public, just couldn't get it. It wasn't until very recently, from my perspective, that finally the art world has jumped on the bandwagon, and they're all excited, and there's shows, and blah-dee-dah-dee-dah. But I'll just wrap up by saying one of the things that was really a problem was textual, and that is that the term that was used in those days for this kind of work wasn't digital art, or whatever we call it today. It was computer graphics. And in the art world that combination of those two words was like anathema. The word computer, you're out of the room. Even though they loved video art. Video art was accepted, and that's a very interesting discussion too. But when you took computer and graphics, which were looked down on in the art world, it was like forget about it, you're not playing at this party.
So Rebecca Allen, I was talking to her a while ago, made the comment that it wasn't that the art world didn't accept us at all, but it's like we were in an art ghetto. And that's pretty much the way it worked in the art world from my point of view. Others may have experienced it differently.
Copper Giloth: I just had a couple comments. So I mentioned in my introduction that I had this interactive installation at the Museum of Contemporary Art. And this well-known critic, one of the funniest statements that he made in talking about the work, and he wasn't totally negative, but he did say that the use of the computer destroyed the contemplative aspects of art making. Now, clearly this man hadn't waited for anything or had no concept of how long it took you to make something.
“And in the art world that combination of those two words was like anathema. The word computer, you're out of the room.” — David Em 39:01
The other thing that happened is I was interviewed for the evening news by Bob Sirott in 1980. And they ended up saying that they thought that maybe this work was going to take over the networks because it was interesting. So there were these two very different responses to the work. And this was 1980.
David Em: Yeah, if I could just jump in with a response to that real quick. You're so right on with that, Copper, because I'm remembering that the big discussion in those days, believe it or not, wasn't, is it good art? It's but is it art? Is it art at all? And how do you deal with that? As Copper just said, you do your blood, your sweat, your tears, the trenches, you do this work. You hope it will be received in some way. And they say, no, it's not. It's not even in the game. So that was what we were dealing with at that time on the conceptual level.
Jeff Davis: Yeah, I just got a quick comment. I was working in an art college at the end of the '80s where we had all these 12 big workstations, and we had mainly design students using it who would make the classic teapot, do all this smooth rendering and whatnot. And they were learning CAD, computer aided design, basically. But we did have quite a few fine art students who would just make their way into the room. It was open access. And I used to run the lab, and they'd do all sorts of really unusual things. They'd make mesh patterns and then somehow photograph them and then use them in their art. And it was a really creative period.
And those students didn't really have any knowledge of the field, because there was no knowledge of the field at the time, or hardly any in England anyway. The Computer Arts Society wasn't operating at the time. I mean, Micro Arts was a kind of tiny version of that, I suppose, putting out information. But that was pretty short lived. And the students would just come in and experiment. And they were very open minded, I thought. So I think that it was the art world rather than the artists who weren't interested.
Darcy Gerbarg: Well, I wanted to say that the art world just didn't know anything about it in the '80s. They weren't familiar with it. In my world in New York, in the art world, we would go all the time to exhibitions at the galleries and at the museums and so on. There was nothing about computer art. And what happened as people found out that I was using computers to make art, which started in '79, was that I'd walk into the room and people would move away from me as if I almost had some awful disease or something. And when you talk to them, they actually were afraid that the computers were going to replace them in some way. The artists were feeling this. Very few of the people on the stage were like that. And very few of the people I knew in that world were willing to even talk about or look at any art that was made with computers at all.
I had the opportunity to work with Cynthia Goodman and had the idea to do an exhibition, a big computer art exhibition in the mid '80s that we started. We had it initiated at the Everson Museum where I had been doing some things. And IBM funded it and we were able to travel it. And it was shown as a big art exhibition in New York at the IBM Museum. But IBM had a huge art collection. They were very well respected for that collection. But they were not one of the recognized real art venues either. They weren't a museum. They weren't an independent gallery or anything like that.
I had the opportunity to take Clem Greenberg through that entire exhibition. And after he looked at all the work, I said to him as a youngster... as bad art. And I think there was a lot of stuff made that just wasn't that great, either. So yes, we're all struggling to make art, and some of our work turned out to be good art, but there was still this very, oh wow factor.
I sort of identified this with one of my first classes of students. The first work they handed in, I looked at the slides and I put them next to the work they had submitted to be accepted to the MFA program. And the quality of the work was not equal. And I sort of said, everyone, the first thing they did with the computer was sort of this, oh wow factor, because they could do it. It was almost more like a dance, the dancing bear, that you could do it at all. And it took a little more time, I think, for artists to get into the tool and really understand, to be able to make it their own and start making the same quality work they would make with any tools, once they got more professional at it.
Conrad House: I think that's a perfect response, Darcy, and great insight on some of the shows that you were helping put together and the responses of people that you kind of walk through these shows. You kind of have firsthand experience in a lot of these public kind of outcries sometimes or responses to it. And then Dan, I see you're unmuted now. Do you want to add in your thought?
Dan Sandin: Yeah, as long as we're beating up on the art world, I would like to point out that the acceptance of photography went through a similar thing. So it isn't really an issue about computers in general. It's an issue about the art world being a bunch of very hard to move people. And as late as 1960, when I started to kind of work in an art world, I was in the art school. I mean, photographers had won the battle. Everybody agreed that it was art, but there was still discussion about it, and it had to do with them using an instrumentality instead of somehow stuck with their hands.
So I kind of disagree with Darcy on the quality front, because some of this early work that was done now is still completely amazing. And although as a community we grow and get better and better, some of that early work, it's still amazing. Some of the early work still stands up completely.
Darcy Gerbarg: Oh, I agree. Some of the early work does stand up. There's no question. You find the same thing, right, with any other medium, whether it's film or whether it's theater or photography.
Dan Sandin: Exactly.
Darcy Gerbarg: Some of it's great and a lot of it is just out there.
William Latham: Yeah, I can add quickly. I definitely agree with the comment about computer graphics, that killer phrase. Computer art, yes. I think the real problem is the audience. Like when I first showed, I had an exhibition called The Conquest of Form that started off at the Arnolfini Gallery. Nice fine art gallery. And it toured for four years. But by the end, the venues that wanted to take the show were mass public venues, like the Natural History Museum, the Deutsches Museum, the science museum in Munich. And so the audience was not your art crowd. It was the Joe public. And they'd stand in front of my big Cibachrome prints and they'd have their photos done. And these were not people that were going to art galleries. There was a big shift in the audience.
And then I remember having a meeting with a number of art world directors, and they asked me a key question. They said, your Mutator software, can it produce millions of images? And I said, yes, it's got the potential. Even 10 millions. And they said, what? And they said, well, in the art world, it's all about rarity. We in fact don't want artists to produce too much work, but your computer can churn these images out indefinitely. And so it was a big mismatch. I didn't get on well with the directors, because I accused their sculptors of being like cavemen chiseling. And I said it was very primitive, and the future of the world is computers, not just chiseling rocks. They definitely didn't like that.
But I think it's really working out who your audience is. In the '90s I really engaged with the much bigger audience. And I think that was the challenge. Maybe the minting processes kind of brought the rarity value back into the frame, and Le Random's doing some great work and maintaining quality in that space. But there's a big cultural shift. And I think one always harks back to the art world, but the audience is much bigger for this work and much more exciting.
Darcy Gerbarg: The art world is an industry and there are pieces of it. There are the artists, the galleries, the museums. Then the auctions kind of came in and sort of squeezed a lot of the galleries out more recently. And I think one of the big issues that I keep coming up against is that the people who you might want to help you sell this artwork just don't know how to talk about it. They don't feel comfortable really presenting it. A lot of it, if you have to plug it in or it requires any technology, that's also been a big issue.
“And they said, well, in the art world, it's all about rarity. We in fact don't want artists to produce too much work, but your computer can churn these images out indefinitely.” — William Latham 48:20
I think the '80s, none of that was sorted out. I mean, it's still a problem today. People want to know, for me, what size is that picture? And I say to myself, well, the aspect ratio is what it is, but it could be any size. It's digital. Well, there's no way to say this to someone who's looking to get something for their home. You say to them, you can do that in a commission situation. But in the '80s, there was just no way to explain the options that people even had to acquire this work.
David Em: That's a really great comment, I think, Darcy, about not knowing how to contextualize the work. Because yes, there were people who are absolutely against it, hook, line and sinker. We all have our stories. But I remember a conversation I had once, I don't know when it was, it might have been in the early '90s, with Holly Solomon. And if any of you remember her, she had a well-respected gallery in New York, and some mutual friends introduced us. And she said, I really like what you're doing. She said, but I don't know how to talk about it. I don't know how to, I just don't understand it at its roots. And so I'm uncomfortable around that in a professional sense. And I got that. I thought that was a very honest response.
They actually look at my work. They like it. They love it. But even when they exhibit it in their galleries, their staff just have no idea how to bring someone to it.
Darcy Gerbarg: We're the ones who are put in a decision-making position. That's changed now. But with this AI, we have a sense view that AI is going to replace people.
Jeff Davis: Just one quick thing. Yeah, and is it art? The media, when I was putting out Micro Arts stuff, we were sort of competing with the games industry. That was the idea. We had cassettes of art rather than cassettes of games. But I never saw it as being a print thing or a physical thing at all. I mean, it was never printed until 2020 for a show, a retrospective in Leicester, through the Computer Arts Archive with Sean Clark. But it never even occurred to me to print it. It was just live art generated by the micro, and you put it on BBC Micro and Spectrum, and then it ended up on a network. It was never a physical thing, and it never even occurred to me that it could be, really. The only printer you could buy in those days was a tiny thermal printer with a kind of, I think it's 10-centimeter. I mean, who's going to do that?
Mark Wilson: I've always been struck, like many of you have recounted, by, I've experienced the antagonism and the indifference of the art world. And I've always been struck by the irony of the art world in the sense that it has always sort of relished the avant-garde, produced all sorts of strange and weird things to see in the gallery. But at the same time, the art world has a very conservative aspect to it and is very unopen to experiencing certain types of new experiences. Like Dan was saying, the experience is similar.
The academy is academia. And it is all of the universities and all the people trained by the universities and all the people getting jobs in the galleries and the museums who are trained at universities. And these are the people who want to believe that they want to find the most innovative things and this and that and the other, but they're all coming from an academic place where they only can really go and see in directions they've learned about. And they miss everything. They always miss something really new.
Copper Giloth: I'm not sure I agree about this thing about academia. Having been in a university for close to 40 years, the people who work in museums come out of the art history department, and they barely acknowledge the people who are in the fine arts departments. And that education that's going on there is really quite different. And I think that their attempt, in the art history areas, to either use new technology to teach their subject matter or even to be able to experience, for instance, my VR pieces, they felt that they were games. And so they should bring their children to see this work that was not at all aimed at children. They see VR, they think children. And these are the people who are moving into these curator positions.
William Latham: Jumping back to the '80s, just to reminisce a bit more about that period. I guess it's worth mentioning the tail end of the '80s, when I was at SIGGRAPH, et cetera. There was a lot of interesting stuff happening with VR, like The Legible City piece by Shaw. Then there was the A-Life crowd. Karl Sims, the Dawkins stuff. It was a very interesting phase. You've got the early '80s, you've got the mid '80s, and then the tail '80s, you get A-Life and also precursors of some of the AI stuff that's happening now, where creative control is passed over to the computer and back to the artist again.
So when you're looking at the '80s, I think there are probably three phases. And at the tail end of the '80s, the dominance of SIGGRAPH starts to shift to places like Ars Electronica, ISEA. There's a kind of broadening out, as probably computer art becomes more popular. But definitely a very interesting period of time. And SIGGRAPH up to that point had been quite competitive each year. Everyone would turn up with their new paper or their algorithms. They'd have a bit of video to go with it. And it was all these really bright people competing. That's what fueled the development of SIGGRAPH. But by the end there was a shift. And I think that was very interesting, and that kind of lays a lot of the groundwork for what comes next.
Conrad House: Yeah. And I think we can probably hand this over to Peter to move on to maybe a next question, and also apologies as this has already gone over time, but this is a very thoughtful discussion. If anyone has to obviously head out for any reason, feel free to just kind of drop off without saying anything. But if you want to stick on for a little bit more, we can ask maybe a couple more questions and we'll get to them. The discussions are very fruitful and it's been awesome so far. So I'll let Peter kind of take it from here.
Peter Bauman: Yeah. I mean, I have a million questions, but maybe I'd like to hear from Stephen, and maybe we can open this up to everybody after that. But it just relates a bit to what you're saying, William. So I called the chapter of the '80s the PC era, the personal computer era. So I'm wondering, do you agree with that chapter title? What would you have called it, Stephen?
Stephen Todd: I'm afraid I've got to rush now, I don't have time to answer that.
William Latham: I can answer it for you, Stephen.
Stephen Todd: No worries.
Peter Bauman: Thank you so much for joining us, Stephen. It was so lovely to have you.
Conrad House: Yeah. Thank you so much, Stephen.
William Latham: So I would call the '90s the PC era. I think everyone was still getting the most out of supercomputers. Yoichiro Kawaguchi was working with Nippon Electric. Karl Sims was at Thinking Machines. Anyone who was doing heavy duty work had to get into a corporate environment. I think the PCs came later. Definitely for me, I did the Organic package for PC, but that was into the '90s. I think in the '80s there was still a lot of innovation. Other people may have a different view. And also the '80s, the internet was still mainly within corporations. The '90s is the age of cyber culture. That was a different era. The PC comes with that.
David Em: I have to agree with William's comments there, because I had that same experience. I mean, I loved PCs. I started building my own machines as early as the '70s, which were essentially personal computers. And I followed it. I owned a bunch of them in the 1980s. I used it for writing and all of that. But when it came to making art, for my purposes, they weren't there yet. It was really at the beginning of the '90s where things really turned around for that. And same deal, as you just said, with the internet. I can still remember the first time I started sending pictures to magazines and things by sending JPEGs over the web. And it was just mind-blowing. No more slides, no more FedEx, no more any of that. So there were those sorts of revolutions. And so the transition to PCs definitely happened during the '80s. But the actual manifestation for artists, at least for me, on a real-time basis, was the '90s.
And I'll just add one more thing. One last tag onto that was, as late as 1979, I remember I did a talk in Berkeley with John Whitney Sr. and Ed Catmull. And afterwards, I got together at Stanford with some computer musicians to talk about things. And the discussion came up of, will we see real PCs in our lifetime? In our lifetime. And these were highly knowledgeable people. And would there be such a thing as the internet where all human culture would be available? And I made a bet with them that in the year 2000 I could walk into a room, go to a personal computer that would be a portable, and download a particular piece of Irish literature. That was the bet. And that happened that year in 2000. So it was really the '90s, I agree, that were the transition point for that. All of the building blocks were there in the '80s, but the real manifestation in people's and artists' lives was right after that.
Jeff Davis: The computers used in art college in 1988 were high-end workstations, proper computer graphics machines with huge monitors and all the rest of it. They were very expensive. They certainly weren't a personal computer that a normal person would use. And yeah, it was later in the '90s that the PCs came out. In the '80s I used to work, had a bit of work after my class, networking PCs. The original IBM, I think it was XTs we were using. The PCs, XTs and ATs were the three first IBM machines. And they were going into the dealing rooms, the market trading dealing rooms in London. And a lot of people had work networking. People like me were kind of networking these things for people like IBM. I mean, Prudential Insurance had a mainframe in the insurance company, looked after by IBM, but they didn't know anything about the IBM PC. So they had to hire a micro person, me, in other words, to go in and network the whole system for the dealers. And even then it was fairly primitive. But previously they were using bits of paper to pass their sales back and forth. And all that was in the mid...
Copper Giloth: And not to say that artists weren't using Apple IIs and all kinds of, you know, the TRS-80s. There were many devices that artists were using. I just want to say that I completely disagree with that. I went through four different personal computers between 1978 and 1990.
Peter Bauman: Can I interrupt?
Copper Giloth: I have an extensive exhibition record from that time. I used these computers for animations, installations, and the '90s was just a continuation.
William Latham: We all played with PCs. I mean, they were wonderful. But it depends what you were trying to do, of course.
Peter Bauman: This is a good point, a good transition, because I'm happy to open it up if you want to ask any questions to each other at this point or bring up any topics that you wanted to discuss.
Dan Sandin: Yeah. My question, you gave me four questions. And the one that I was interested in was number four, which is, did you feel there was less gender bias in the '80s, as Grant Taylor's article, which references you, seems to indicate? It apparently masculinized soon after. Was this your experience, Copper? And I don't know if there's a whole other part to it. So maybe you can read it yourselves.
Peter Bauman: I think you covered most of it. But the question is, do you feel there was less gender bias in the '80s, as an article that I shared by Grant Taylor, who interviewed several computer artists at that time?
Copper Giloth: Yeah, including he interviewed myself. And I had a couple comments about this. One, I was in a really supportive community in Chicago, and I didn't feel any gender bias there. I felt a tremendous amount of gender bias in the art world. It was a masculinized world. Not only were they not interested in computers, they were not interested in women who made anything. So there's that.
The other thing about the computer graphics world, and I know I'm referencing the '90s here, but one of the pieces I did in the '90s was to look at how researchers in computer graphics imaged women's bodies, which we experienced all the time. And the majority, these women's bodies were very sexualized from a male perspective. And they were just thrown at us that this is research, and we have to use a sexy female for this. And so I documented and showed it at SIGGRAPH. And a lot of my responses from men at SIGGRAPH, who were predominant in the research area, was, oh, well, we really hadn't realized this. And that was showing what their bias, what their view of women was.
So I don't think it was up for grabs or wide open. I felt like in the community in Chicago I got a lot of support. But I don't know that, and I certainly, in the organization SIGGRAPH, they were willing to tolerate my critique of them in terms of how they dealt with women's bodies.
Peter Bauman: It's a really powerful video. I saw it recently, and it's shocking how women are portrayed by even SIGGRAPH members.
Copper Giloth: I don't think it was a wildly gender-free area in the '80s. I just disagree with that. But I do feel that the community in Chicago, where I was, was very supportive.
Conrad House: Welcome back, Darcy. Hopefully connection's a bit better now.
Darcy Gerbarg: Can you hear me now?
Conrad House: Yes, perfect.
Darcy Gerbarg: I wanted to add a perspective. I don't know, this may be a totally different discussion by now, but one of the things that I remember thinking in the '80s was that up until about '85, we knew every artist who was using computers and their work, pretty much. And in '85 that population so exploded, with the advent of the Mac having full color, that things really did change. And a huge, huge additional number of artists started using these tools.
Now, the other thing is this discussion today has really been very technology-centric in many ways. There were so many different areas of art. We didn't see the same thing with fonts. We talked about fonts. We didn't say a word about gaming, which was huge. There was the whole, and then the ways in which artists were using these tools to make really interesting digital images. So we didn't talk about the difference between what was going on in terms of real-time graphics versus computed graphics.
Another big thing is everybody that was using computers was using systems that people were developing the algorithms for. I mean, yeah, there weren't software packages to buy, but there wasn't software. Everyone was writing what they needed. Now, many of the people writing that software were very seriously good programmers, and they were in organizations, commercial, and all over, technology ones, and in lots and lots of places. And artists like myself fit into that world without needing to program. It wasn't necessary. It didn't make sense for me at NYIT to try and write my own software when I could say to Tom Duff, could you write me a hack that would do blah, blah, blah? And he would literally walk by the computer, pass his hand over the keyboard, not even slow down, and it would be done.
So I want to say the '80s, I think, did change a lot, because the tools became available to so many more artists and so many more people. And also, I started the program in computer art at the School of Visual Arts, I think it was '86. That was the first time a college for art had such a thing. And that proliferated all over the world very quickly. So the '80s saw a lot of change.
I built my own computer also. I bought my own frame buffer. I did all the hardware stuff. My partner did all the software stuff. I had my own paint system written. And this whole generative thing is such a, it's a piece, and it's getting a lot of publicity now, but it's so not the whole story.
Peter Bauman: And yeah, that's a great point. And maybe we can bring in Dan, because you mentioned games, and I'd love to bring in Copper and Dan and their contribution to video game art in the early '80s with GRASS and Z-Grass. I'd love to talk about that.
Darcy Gerbarg: Chicago was a very, very unusual place, and there was huge talent there. A lot happened in Chicago, a lot.
Peter Bauman: Yeah, Dan, why don't you jump in, please?
Dan Sandin: Yeah, it was an amazing time, and there was this large sharing community, and so we got a lot of stuff done in terms of development.
One of the topics that was in the list that I was kind of interested in is just the concept of generative art, which is one of the themes, and how it's changing now. If you look at this gadget, I taught a class, an art class, that had the BASIC programming system, and they would generate images, and of course it couldn't do anything but generative art. It had no way to get images in. I mean, you had a joystick, but I don't know anybody that successfully drew with a joystick. And so it was just confined in a sense to generative art. And so I think that was one of the positive things about the experience, to have essentially the limitations of where you simply head to.
And then you jump to now, and it's like me talking to an AI system and saying, I want an image of a Viking, a large Viking family from Sweden having dinner. And then it produces this big thing with a lot of fish on the table, which is kind of, and that's obviously generative art too. But it's an entirely different experience for the person producing it. And the generative art that was kind of done in the '80s in many respects went back to the platonic life of mathematics and things coming out of this other realm. And so now I don't know what it any longer means in terms of generative art, because everything you do in art is rule-based, for large chunks of it anyway.
Copper Giloth: It's great that Dan has this picture of the Bally Arcade up there, because that, with an addition of a keyboard, was, and I did things on it. I was successful at using that joystick for drawing. And I did a piece called Skippy Peanut Butter Jars, and I wrote the software to do it, and it was painful. But I also came from a sculpture background, and I was taught in sculpture to make my own tools. So I came from a different, a three-dimensional place.
The other thing is that there was this video game industry in Chicago, and there was something about this arcade that just lightened up your whole life. It was like I could smile, because I was now in graduate school and I wasn't really smiling as a sculpture student. It really hadn't been appropriate. One could be silly because this device was silly. And because I had been exposed to computers all my life, this was like the first time I could kind of laugh at it, which humor is a whole section of my work. And I think that that went across a lot of the people using these devices, because it was fun. I mean, it was fun having problems, and it was fun making this work, and you had lots of people to work with. And so that rich community made it all worthwhile. And lots of funny things happened.
And my favorite thing about making Skippy Peanut Butter Jars with this unit was that my piece, which has nudes in it, low resolution nudes, was banned from the grad show in the Sears Tower because it had nudity in it. I mean, it was really hard to process this, but it couldn't be in the show because it was in a public place. So the idea, and this goes to some of the other comments about where work was shown, is that these public places have these rules about what's art. And the idea of banning a nude from an art exhibition is in itself quite amusing, especially when it's that low resolution.
And I think that the matching of this video community in Chicago with these budding small end computers was a really beautiful match. It just produced all sorts of different things, ranging from people ending up with things on pieces of paper, mostly video, but also interactive installations, because it was set up to do that.
Peter Bauman: Fascinating that also in Chicago was Sonia and what she was doing as well, which is what also makes it such a remarkable place.
Copper Giloth: I agree. I mean, at the same time, there was a crossover with some of those people, and sometimes it was really the butting of heads. But if you think about the work that came from that group that had also originated with Xerox machines and the machines in the past to make generative things, there was a very rich history.
William Latham: You made me think quite a bit about the '80s, that split on technology. I can remember, you're right, people were using Macs to generate really nice graphics, but in some ways there was a split. The games tended to be sprite based, vector based. If they were in an arcade, there were mods, it was like Monkey Island. The games were pretty retro. They literally were at that time. There was a split between two communities, I guess. I was able to get into corporate environments, so I got access to mainframes, but you're right. There was a lot of other interesting work happening.
And I think the problem was after that, with Silicon Graphics, anyone who wasn't within the corporation that wanted to produce photorealistic work had to go and buy a Silicon Graphics machine, which would be about the equivalent to $30,000 now. They would literally have to take out a mortgage to buy a top end machine. And then Silicon Graphics really stifled, they went bust in the end. They really stifled creativity. The commercial graphics were starting to take off. But it's interesting to record on that time.
Darcy Gerbarg: I don't agree with that at all. I don't think Silicon Graphics stifled anything. I think the push at SIGGRAPH to get more and more realism, and that was really the focus of all the papers accepted and all the things that presented, and that's really focused in the film industry. And SGI was a big, good part of that. And so for us to be able to do such a...
William Latham: ...the sort of video, VJ culture that was going on at the time. This would have been probably '90s, wouldn't it? So slightly later.
So, yeah, what I found with my work, there'd been a huge audience. It comes back to the audience question. The people that were going to raves in huge warehouses and dancing like lunatics, taking ecstasy, watching my videos. That was my audience. Drug-taking, rave people. And I had a big following, and I didn't even know about it whilst I was within IBM. So when IBM was scaling back on its scientific centres, I got approached by different bands to produce all their graphics, album covers, directing videos.
And then Universal Studios approached me. They thought my graphics looked like The Thing. Would I produce a game for them? They gave me about $7 million. So it was a real Dr. Faustus situation. I sold my soul to the music industry and film industry. It was very interesting, but managed 13 years later to finally get back to doing interesting work.
So rave music was very influential. You like color, and the whole stuff I've done in VR later was very influenced by rave and how you kind of deliver experiences, which is a sort of full on, very, very direct experiences. But yeah, I decided not to go back into the art world or into the academic world, and just went into the commercial space, which had big pros and cons.
You know, like with Stephen, when I restarted work with him 13 plus years later, we picked up the work like from the day before. He said, what were we doing 15 years ago? And thankfully, we'd written a book, because all the software had deteriorated, and we were able to go to the book and reimplement all the algorithms from the book that we'd written. What we didn't realize is lots of other people had done the same and produced their own graphics. Like a lot of generative art now, I can see hints of the algorithms in the book. So it's an interesting tale.
So I'm back doing art again, but I lost 13, 15 years just dealing with Hollywood and the music industry. It was interesting, but ultimately boring. So I'm rambling on a bit there, but it's a good question. My audience comes back, like with the Deutsches Museum, the Natural History Museum. They were the indication the audience for this type of work is much bigger. It's mass market. It's not for an elite art market.
Conrad House: Great response, William, and kind of the influence that rave aesthetics and kind of electronic music has kind of had for digital art in general. So if we can maybe push over to Mark. Maybe this is something we kind of heard from some past people in the call already, but a lot of you kind of come from painter backgrounds who were pushing paint on a canvas and then kind of transformed into working with computers. And maybe, Mark, can you maybe expand more on how starting out as a painter influenced kind of your geometric background? Or you also kind of talked about how you were predisposed to some of these images of microprocessors and computer parts that kind of influenced a lot of your work. Maybe just expanding on that would be wonderful to hear about.
Mark Wilson: Sure. First, I just wanted to make a comment about everyone's dialogue here. And it's quite extraordinary how we all started out. And there is basically no context for what we were doing, or very little context. People had used computers to make art in the '70s. But we all sort of had to invent this all by ourselves. And we all did it in different ways. And we all had different kinds of access to hardware and software. And it's fascinating. It's fascinating how we all got involved in this and sort of invented all of this in our own ways.
Peter Bauman: It's a perfect way to kind of wrap everything up and to offer a perspective after this amazingly interesting talk. But again, Mark, you summed up really perfectly how diverse everybody's skills and talents and interests and hardware. I'd like to, if anybody else would like to maybe have any closing thoughts.
Copper Giloth: I just want to say, I think it was William who made this comment. I was really interested in it. Just to say, as it moves to the '90s, I think you said that you thought that SIGGRAPH started to change at the end of the '80s because the focus of all the research was expanding out. And then ISEA came about, and Ars Electronica and some other exhibitions. And I think that those exhibitions had a stronger focus on artists. The focus was artists, whereas SIGGRAPH was this collective of research and art and everything. And I think that helped defocus what happened.
And also, academia started, it eventually got PhDs in art, and artists could write papers and needed to get credit. And then you see where SIGGRAPH is now versus where it was in the '80s where everybody was there. And that relates to what Darcy said about, you knew everybody, you'd heard of them. Except the only correction to that I would say is, it was very important to me, and because I now spend a lot of time in Europe, I realized, and through my reading, that I was quite ignorant of things that were going on in Europe, Asia and South America, and even Africa. And that was going on in the '80s.
Darcy Gerbarg: I agree. It was very fragmented.
Copper Giloth: Anyway, thank you very much. It was great to hear all of you talk. I really learned some things. Thank you.
Mark Wilson: It was really a lot of fun to speak with you.
Peter Bauman: Thank you so much, everybody. We can't really say it enough. It's such an honor.
Dan Sandin: Really good, really good event. Thank you.
Peter Bauman: Thank you.
Copper Giloth: Thank you, everybody. Nice seeing everyone. See you soon.
Conrad House: Thank you, Dan. Bye.
Peter Bauman: Thank you, Darcy, Copper, Jeff. Thank you guys so much.
Conrad House: Bye-bye, guys. Take care. Nice to see you, Dan. Bye.
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