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Charles Csury: I think what is hard to convey to people is what it was like in the 1960's.

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We had one computer for the entire campus. There was no commercial software.

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All they gave you was instructions about how to get the pen to move up and how it could go down.

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Then you were on your own.

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So we had to develop everything from the ground up.

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We used Fortran language for overnight runs.

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The next day you got back punch cards, which we then used to drive a drum plotter to make those early computer drawings.

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Remember, there was no internet, and I was really intellectually isolated.

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Nobody in the art would talk to me, and for years I went around talking to myself, believe it or not.

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Just making up questions to ask myself: "Are you crazy or are you on the right track?"

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I'm still not sure. As an artist, you had to be a lunatic, to be involved with art.

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And it took me 3 years before I could get a paper published on the idea of computers and art.

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I finally got it published. Guess where? In the International Journal of Electrical Engineering.

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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.

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Fortunately, I had tenure. Later, I learned I was the first professional artist in the entire world to become involved with the computer.

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And this is the first computer sculpture, and the only one I ever did, but years later,

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I discovered this was the first tree access-milling machine sculpture ever done by anybody.

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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,

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but in Old Dicky (?) Columbus, Ohio.

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And you saw this drawing before: we used quadratic equations. I really wasn't smart enough to figure out quadratic equations,

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I had a mathematician help me, but it let me play with parameter space, which allows me to introduce the idea of art (?).

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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.

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But this guy, Philip Leider, was a well-known art critic in New York, and you can see what he says:

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he couldn't imagine anybody ever working with electronics in art. Notice he was working with an old typewriter, with X's,

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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.

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It might be worth thousands of dollars about 20 years from now.

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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.

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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

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for the Arts and Design. You can tell I was a little full of myself: I wrote "Director" at the top.

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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 (?).

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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.

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Here is the example of a texture map that I made in the computer, where I actually took my own paint marks, scanned them.

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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.

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And later, I'll show you some animation of something like this, which is kind of interesting.

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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,

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so that as you positioned it in 3-space, you would get more a spatial quality and a feeling of depth.

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Now I think I need to take a little time to explain to you a couple of things about how I work.

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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.

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Steve was doing his Ph. D. here at Ohio State. The language uses the content (?) of an encapsulated model.

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Objects are models in a computer, each with their own attributes and behaviors. But behaviors are defined as functions,

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and they are based upon rules and procedures. Each object can have its own light source and its own space.

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The language also allows me to make calls to external code that was written 15-20 years ago.

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Basically, what I do is, I use the Animation Language to assign scale, color and other attributes to an object or objects.

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And I set the calls to programs which can fragment, decimate, or alter objects' appearances.

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Then I establish a box, which we call the World Space. Within this box, objects are randomly placed and oriented.

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I set up parameter ranges establishing their position and rotations, which means I can set minus 30 to positive 30.

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And so it'll pick some range in between them randomly.

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And then, I let the program run to create a series of frames or pictures.And what you see here are 25 frames.

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Usually, what I do is I will run 500 frames. Then I go through and decide: "OK, #25 has some possibilities, or #23".

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Essentially, I am setting up the problem, so that I'm using the computer more like a search engine, helping me to discover art.

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And I find this is a more interesting and productive way for me to work, than trying to make a picture piece by piece.