Randomness
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In 1971, Mohr's work was featured in “Une Esthétique Programmée” at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. This exhibition is distinguished as the first solo show of artworks created with a computer to be shown at a museum. Random values were used extensively in the creation of the work, much of it [MORE] | In 1971, Mohr's work was featured in “Une Esthétique Programmée” at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. This exhibition is distinguished as the first solo show of artworks created with a computer to be shown at a museum. Random values were used extensively in the creation of the work, much of it [MORE] | ||
| − | Charles Csuri's ''Random War'' (1967) is another early notable work of computer art to use random values. Like much of Csuri's early computer work and unique in relation to his contemporaries, the work is figurative rather than abstract. This plotter drawing is comprised of outlined military figures patterned off of the little green army men toys popular at the time. Each figure, named after a real person, is placed randomly on the page and given a random status: dead, wounded, or missing. The solders of one army are drawn in red and the other in black; the names and status of each soldier appear at the top of the drawing. The drawing comments on the often arbitrary nature of war through both its form and content. | + | Charles Csuri's ''Random War'' (1967) is another early notable work of computer art to use random values. Like much of Csuri's early computer work and unique in relation to his contemporaries, the work is figurative rather than abstract. This plotter drawing is comprised of outlined military figures patterned off of the little green army men toys popular at the time. Each figure, named after a real person, is placed randomly on the page and given a random status: dead, wounded, or missing. The solders of one army are drawn in red and the other in black; the names and status of each soldier appear at the top of the drawing. In general terms, Csuri's work comments on the often arbitrary nature of war through both its form and content; more specifically, with his reliance on random number generation, Csuri gestures toward the days of computers and random numbers, and their inextricable link to the Cold War. |
While the first decade of computer-generated art was well documented in magazines, books, and exhibition catalogs, there are fewer source materials from the 1970s as public interest veered and the energy needed to publish and exhibition waned. Later in the decade as computer graphics started to make their way into advertising and films, the public record picks up. The 1982 film ''Tron'' is a landmark in the history of computation and aesthetics. This film pushed the aesthetics of computer graphics to a new level and it therefore also revealed the limitations of computer imagery at that time. Specifically, the images are purely geometric and cold; they lack the organic qualities of our natural world. Ken Perlin, one of the programmers for the Tron CGI, was frustrated with the clean look and he later developed a technique called Perlin Noise in 1983 to generate organic textures with a random appearance, but fully controllable to allow for careful design. Perlin Noise allows computer graphics models to have the subtle irregularities of real objects; it's used to create hard surfaces such as rocks and mountains and softer systems like fire and clouds. By the 1990s, it was used extensively in Hollywood special-effects films and had been incorporated into most off-the-shelf modeling software. | While the first decade of computer-generated art was well documented in magazines, books, and exhibition catalogs, there are fewer source materials from the 1970s as public interest veered and the energy needed to publish and exhibition waned. Later in the decade as computer graphics started to make their way into advertising and films, the public record picks up. The 1982 film ''Tron'' is a landmark in the history of computation and aesthetics. This film pushed the aesthetics of computer graphics to a new level and it therefore also revealed the limitations of computer imagery at that time. Specifically, the images are purely geometric and cold; they lack the organic qualities of our natural world. Ken Perlin, one of the programmers for the Tron CGI, was frustrated with the clean look and he later developed a technique called Perlin Noise in 1983 to generate organic textures with a random appearance, but fully controllable to allow for careful design. Perlin Noise allows computer graphics models to have the subtle irregularities of real objects; it's used to create hard surfaces such as rocks and mountains and softer systems like fire and clouds. By the 1990s, it was used extensively in Hollywood special-effects films and had been incorporated into most off-the-shelf modeling software. | ||
