the joy of the monitor screen
Mar. 8th, 2006 03:17 pmResearch for a future project. I want to experiment with a certain look that a few computer art pioneers exemplified - undirected, painterly, abstracted work on crude materials, not trying to simulate other media, not yet capable of the unearthly perfection of today's hardware. Stuff that would be captured as a photo of a monitor, reveling in the visible phosphor dots.
David Em is easy to find. He bought davidem.com. The images up on his site only hint at the low-res joy of the reproductions I saw back in the eighties; they're captured without the phosphor masks, the visible artifacts of the medium that were as much a part of it as the texture of canvas and brushstroke is of a painting. I have a few examples in this old book on mid-eighties computer graphics that show this...
Richard Berry is harder to find. Googling for him is obscured by the guy who wrote 'Louie Louie'. All I can find are a few artifacts, like the cover of the game based on Neuromancer and the covers he did for one edition of Gibson's cyberpunk books. He started, I think, with an Apple II, and made stuff that really embraced the crudeness of the medium - strikingly garish, with all these distinctive experiments with the evolving capabilities of the tools to smear and distort his work around. Fucking hideous from one perspective, and wonderful from another. I halfway remember funning across his site a few years ago, and seeing work that was just as joyously embracing the garish craziness of things like Painter's then-new 'liquid metal' brush.
If anyone with better search skills than me can hunt up a collection of his stuff online, please let me know!
edit: Um, actually, his site is the top hit for googling for 'richard berry artist'; something in me looked at the front page and just said "this is not the Richard Berry I'm looking for, it's a pretty common name". Thanks for making me look deeper at it, Rik.
(And while I'm talking about artists who I've liked but not necessarily been influenced by - check out the photo manipulations of JK Potter sometime. Yummy. Unfortunately jkpotter.com seems to be down.)
David Em is easy to find. He bought davidem.com. The images up on his site only hint at the low-res joy of the reproductions I saw back in the eighties; they're captured without the phosphor masks, the visible artifacts of the medium that were as much a part of it as the texture of canvas and brushstroke is of a painting. I have a few examples in this old book on mid-eighties computer graphics that show this...
edit: Um, actually, his site is the top hit for googling for 'richard berry artist'; something in me looked at the front page and just said "this is not the Richard Berry I'm looking for, it's a pretty common name". Thanks for making me look deeper at it, Rik.
(And while I'm talking about artists who I've liked but not necessarily been influenced by - check out the photo manipulations of JK Potter sometime. Yummy. Unfortunately jkpotter.com seems to be down.)