Charles Csury: I think what is hard to convey to people is what it was like in the 1960's.
We had one computer for the entire campus. There was no commercial software.
All they gave you was instructions about how to get the pen to move up and how it could go down.
Then you were on your own.
So we had to develop everything from the ground up.
We used Fortran language for overnight runs.
The next day you got back punch cards, which we then used to drive a drum plotter to make those early computer drawings.
Remember, there was no internet, and I was really intellectually isolated.
Nobody in the art would talk to me, and for years I went around talking to myself, believe it or not.
Just making up questions to ask myself: "Are you crazy or are you on the right track?"
I'm still not sure. As an artist, you had to be a lunatic, to be involved with art.
And it took me 3 years before I could get a paper published on the idea of computers and art.
I finally got it published. Guess where? In the International Journal of Electrical Engineering.
In hindsight, it was like something out of the 19th century. I can't believe I survived the times, that I was not kicked out of the university.
Fortunately, I had tenure. Later, I learned I was the first professional artist in the entire world to become involved with the computer.
And this is the first computer sculpture, and the only one I ever did, but years later,
I discovered this was the first tree access-milling machine sculpture ever done by anybody.
I didn't realize it until much later: it's the first in the entire world. It wasn't done in New York, or in London, or Paris,
but in Old Dicky (?) Columbus, Ohio.
And you saw this drawing before: we used quadratic equations. I really wasn't smart enough to figure out quadratic equations,
I had a mathematician help me, but it let me play with parameter space, which allows me to introduce the idea of art (?).
This is something I cherish a great deal. It's a rejection from Artforum magazine. I don't know if you can read that or not.
But this guy, Philip Leider, was a well-known art critic in New York, and you can see what he says:
he couldn't imagine anybody ever working with electronics in art. Notice he was working with an old typewriter, with X's,
he typed, knocked out those comments and so on. I sometimes think that in the antique Roman (?) show, this might perhaps be of real value.
It might be worth thousands of dollars about 20 years from now.
And early in my - when i shifted to 3-D graphs and was able to, I got involved in texture mapping, where I used some of my old paintings to texture maps onto 3-D objects.
And this one is a little fudgy but I still like it. This was shortly - I remember I became director of the Advanced Computing Center
for the Arts and Design. You can tell I was a little full of myself: I wrote "Director" at the top.
And I guess at the time I was also involved with the National Institute of Health and somebody else, because that's part of the droiding (?).
My wife also told me, bring home some more wine (?) and some milk. But anyway, that was my texture map, and I kind of like what it represents.
Here is the example of a texture map that I made in the computer, where I actually took my own paint marks, scanned them.
The brush marks were put into the computer, then I made that into a texture map and here we have what happens when you do something like that.
And later, I'll show you some animation of something like this, which is kind of interesting.
Another example of taking a texture map and mapping it on to - in this case, what I did is that I took a cube, removed 2 of the faces,
so that as you positioned it in 3-space, you would get more a spatial quality and a feeling of depth.
Now I think I need to take a little time to explain to you a couple of things about how I work.
I call this the Infinity series, and I used a language called AL, Animation Language, that was developed by Steve May, who is now at Pixar.
Steve was doing his Ph. D. here at Ohio State. The language uses the content (?) of an encapsulated model.
Objects are models in a computer, each with their own attributes and behaviors. But behaviors are defined as functions,
and they are based upon rules and procedures. Each object can have its own light source and its own space.
The language also allows me to make calls to external code that was written 15-20 years ago.
Basically, what I do is, I use the Animation Language to assign scale, color and other attributes to an object or objects.
And I set the calls to programs which can fragment, decimate, or alter objects' appearances.
Then I establish a box, which we call the World Space. Within this box, objects are randomly placed and oriented.
I set up parameter ranges establishing their position and rotations, which means I can set minus 30 to positive 30.
And so it'll pick some range in between them randomly.
And then, I let the program run to create a series of frames or pictures.And what you see here are 25 frames.
Usually, what I do is I will run 500 frames. Then I go through and decide: "OK, #25 has some possibilities, or #23".
Essentially, I am setting up the problem, so that I'm using the computer more like a search engine, helping me to discover art.
And I find this is a more interesting and productive way for me to work, than trying to make a picture piece by piece.