prosthetic knowledge

Computer City - 1964 by Dennis Crompton

Structural architectural idea from Archigram illustrating the future importance of information flow within urban spaces:

Computer City described the city as a network of flows—flows of traffic, goods, people, and above all information.
Strongly reminiscent of diodes and electrical substations, it was probably posited not so much as an alternative to the spawning urban forms of Plug-In City but,
floating in abstract space, as a diagram of the systems that would let Plug-In City work, their chatter of data spooling across the top.

Taken from ‘Archigram: Architecture without Architecture (2005)’ which can be found at Monoskop here

Excerpts

Interesting collection of posts from the okkult Tumblr blog which takes a look at films of interest in the public domain, complete with descriptions, links, and of course, gifs.

All are tagged under ‘excerpts’, which you can see for yourself here

Digital TV Dinner

Early example of digital glitch art from 1979 - video embedded below:

Digital TV Dinner is a video art clip from 1979 created by Raul Zaritsky, Jamie Fenton, and Dick Ainsworth using the Bally Astrocade console game to generate unusual patterns.

The Bally Astrocade was unique among cartridge games in that it was designed to allow users to change game cartridges with power-on. When pressing the reset button, it was possible to remove the cartridge from the system and induce various memory dump pattern sequences. DIgital TV DInner is a collection of these curious states of silicon epilepsy set to music composed and generated upon this same platform.

Link

Hat-Tip to both Recyclism and systemsapproach

Drawing With Computers

The Artist’s Guide To Computer Graphics

1985 book by Mark Wilson scanned + PDF freely available from the author, with interesting examples of computer graphic history.

You can download it here

“Computing/Drawing With a Vintage Pen Plotter” by Carl Lostritto

Modern drawing experiments with older output technology creating abstract art:

This is the database of “Computing/Drawing With a Vintage Pen Plotter,” a project by Carl Lostritto. Drawings are organized by method, series, and run using the following syntax: Method-Series-Run. A “method” is an algorithmic approach to controlling the pen plotter and is the most general way to organize these drawings. Within each method, a “series” refers to a specific python code and/or plotter configuration. A run refers to one drawing within the series. Whether the drawing is re-plotted or generates a series of drawings, the run identifier keeps track of their production order over time.

The collection can be found here, with some examples of animations demonstrating techniques as well as videos performing the mechanical drawings.

The Art of Nandan Ghiya

Artist creates works using vintage portraits with physical modern-day digital distortions.

More info and examples of the artist’s work can be found at Ocular here and Galerie Paris-Beijing here

Rhizome: Prosthetic Knowledge Picks - Kinect Genealogy - A Brief History of Gestural Interfaces 

To commemorate the upcoming second anniversary of the release of Microsoft’s Kinect, a device which changed interactive art, I take a look at other examples of creative gestural interfaces from the 1960’s to the 1990’s, plus more.

You can see the entire piece at Rhizome here

SOFTWARE - An Exhibition (1970) 

Fascinating art catalogue of an exhibition which explores the creative potential of communication technologies, with ideas and approaches which are relevant today.

Some hightlights:

The first three images above refer to a project called ‘Seek’ by M.I.T. featuring an enclosed space filled with toy blocks that are placed by a robotic hand. Also inside are some gerbals who navigate themselves around the changing environment they find themselves in.

“Notes on art and information processing” essay by Jack Burnham is worth a read, with some great highlighted quotes.

“The Crafting of Media” brief essay by Theodor H. Nelson also has some interesting points, inventing the term ‘cybercrud’ to refer to information shared to one another via computer, and the first time (I have heard) the term ‘hypergram’ used a visual relation to hypertext, which could be best understood in the way a photo in Facebook or Flick is tagged with additional information which is referenceable within it.

Tactile Film by Linda Berris.

There are many others (various sound art projects, one which employs solar panels), even conceptual billboard work.

You can get a link to a pdf download via Monoskop Log here (discovered via brown-and-son)

Rhizome: Prosthetic Knowledge Picks: Computer Graphics & Art 1976 - 1978 

A brief look at a short-lived American quarterly publication, which gives a little insight into the practice of art with computers in the 1970’s. While a product of its time, there are some places with resonances to the practice of today.

More at Rhizome here

How Computer-Generated Animations Were Made, Circa 1964 

Interesting computer-made presentation demonstrating the earlier concepts of computer graphics. It is 15 minutes long, silent, and very slow moving, but from a digital literacy perspective, essential watching:

This film explains how the computer scientists and mathematicians at Bell Labs created early computer graphics films, like most (though not all) of these films, made by Bell Labs employees E.E. Zajac, A. Michael Noll, Ken Knowlton, Frank Sinden, and many others.

This film, A Computer Technique For the Production of Animated Movies, from 1964, gives the basics on the process, from Ken Knowlton’s BEFLIX programming language for a raster-scan (bitmap) output, to the hardware details (IBM 7094 mainframe, Stromberg-Carlson 4020 microfilm printer). 

Source

Visualing Poetry with 1960s Computer Graphics 

Experimental collection of films made in late 1960’s using a computer has surprising digital and glitch aesthetic - video embedded below:

[PK Note - I’m not going to lie, the film isn’t going to be for everyone, and it does feature some abstract jazz which may hurt your ears if you are listening via headphone. As you’ll see in the excerpt below, a computer was used to create the composition but not the colours, which was added later. Still, I do see it as a possible precursor to glitch we are more familiar with today]

From 1964 through around 1969, artist Stan VanDerBeek worked with computer scientist Ken Knowlton on a series of films:

… Each film was constructed using Knowlton’s BEFLIX computer language, which was based on FORTRAN. The films were programmed on a IBM 7094 computer. The films were created in black and white, with color added later by Brown and Olvey. This particular version is taken from a film with some color decay.

VanDerBeek passed away in 1984. He is also part of the film Incredible Machine, made in 1968. VanDerBeek was part of a unique program at Bell Labs that allowed artists to work with computer scientists in order to explore and advance the technology in the fields of computer graphics and music.

Source Here

The Talking Computer 

Early computer animation from 1967 to demonstrate early text-to-speech synthesis - via AT&T Archives, video embedded below:

Speech synthesis at Bell Labs dates back to the 1930s and Homer Dudley’s Voder, which was exhibited and publicly demonstrated at the 1939 World’s Fair. Because understanding all aspects of the conversion of speech to electrical signal was a core interest of the Bell System, speech synthesis research continued at the company in the ensuing decades, entering the computer era in the 1960s, with articulatory speech vocal tract models created by Paul Mermelstein, Cecil Coker, John L. Kelly Jr., and Louis Gerstman, among others. Text-to-speech programs were researched from the 1960s all the way to the present day.

This film specifically documents the output of an early text-to-speech program. Cecil Coker worked on this project, which is an articulatory synthesis program. Coker most likely first presented this film at a conference, either in Japan or at the 1967 M.I.T. Conference on Speech Communication and Processing, or the 1968 Processed Speech Symposium in Kyoto. 

More Here

Metropolis Film Programme For London Premiere, 1927 

Fascinating and insightful hi-res scan of an incredibly rare piece of film history - via The Cataloguer’s Desk:

The world’s most valuable movie poster, for Fritz Lang’s 1927 masterpiece Metropolis, is to be auctioned again after making a record $690,000 in 2005. Ephemera related to the film is notoriously scarce, with only four copies of the poster known to survive. Almost as uncommon is this amazing film programme, one of only three surviving copies of which we’re aware, produced for the London premiere at the Marble Arch Pavilion on March 21, 1927. Not only a list of cast and crew, it includes eleven short pieces on the making of the movie, commentary from the director and cast, and numerous production photographs and film stills, many attractively arranged as modernist collages. One of the most interesting sections shows in parallel columns how a passage of film scenes was adapted from the novel of the same name by Lang’s wife, Thea von Harbou. 

You can read and examine the whole booklet here

Théâtre Optique 

Walt Disney introduces the work of Charles-Émile Reynaud, who invented the Praxinoscope and the Théâtre Optique, which was the first technology to present moving images to the public. The video also includes some early examples of other animation:

A colour version of the example film shown above can be found here