Friday, September 17, 2010

In the beginning: John Whitney and the genesis of his computer art

An inventor, computer-artist, and a media revolutionary.  These are all aspects of John Whitney. Early on he observed the potential in borrowing logic from other subject areas and applying it to invent ‘… abstract cinema art that would look the way music sounded.’ (Whitney 1980, p.21).  His unabashed account of drawing inspiration from various disciplines is significant to the remediated nature of today’s artistic culture: ‘No medium today, and certainly no single media event, seems to do its cultural work in isolation from other media, any more than it works in isolation from other social and economic forces.’ (Bolter & Grusin 1999).

As Whitney pursued his ambition to create a visual that was music for the eyes, he became acutely aware that his concept was not in fact original.  Earlier attempts including  Leonardo’s exploration into relationships between music and colour and Walter Puttman’s films named after symphonies shared a similar premise.  Abstract film art was also recorded as being explored as early as the 1920’s in Viking Eggeling’s work  Horizontal Vertical Orchestra and Diagonal Symphony, as well as Anaemic Cinema by Marcel Duchamp (Le Grice 1974) .  Although Whitney eventually drew the conclusion that prior attempts had failed because the tools employed were a limitation to the sophisticated concepts trying to be achieved, he too experimented with the devices of the day.  Using cinematic techniques borrowed from Schoenberg he sought to create, what he came to term as, a visualisation of ‘liquid architecture’ (Whitney 1980, p.22). Refusing to allow the inadequacies of current tools and mediums to compromise his vision he instead declared that a new medium was in need of invention.

Fortunately, research into art and technology was beginning to gather some support through various committees in the 1960s.  However, it was through the support of research grants by IBM that Whitney’s work began to gather momentum.  His concept:

‘…I thought that any visual art, structured in time, would need some generative building block – an alphabet or scale. I asked repeatedly what visual elementals might match the scales of tones of music with which numberless musical constructs can be treated, or the alphabets by which an infinity of ideas is constructed. Now that I was free to explore, I soon found that for the first time in history, visual periodicity and harmonics were accessible to dynamic manipulation through the instrument of computer graphics.’ (Whitney 1980, p.p. 29-30)

As his research continued, the politics of achieving a harmonious, collaborative relationship between the fields of art and science deepened. According to Whitney, attitudes needing to be mediated included those who believed the computer to only be capable of ‘sterile mechanisation’ (Whitney 1980, p.31) and those who simply feared the computer’s potential to control society. Interestingly, in contrast to Whitney’s own account of the apprehensions of that time, Darley describes the mood of the day as more optimistic: ‘The dominant tone of this thinking was of intense optimism: technology, was invoked as a panacea for the ills of the present.’.

Whitney saw artists like Jackson Pollock as posing interesting questions that were to become his resolve to research and answer. The relationship between motion, emotion, time and visualisation were all things Whitney wanted to depict visually.  His logic on how to achieve patterned motion took, for the most part, from music. He transposed the idea of music’s tonal patterns and chord formations: ‘…if one [graphical] element were set to move at a given rate, the next element might be moved two times that rate…Each element would move at a different rate and in a different direction within the field of action.’ (Whitney 1980, p.38).  In such descriptions we can observe the mathematical relationships that are applied to music being the foundation of Whitney’s concepts.  Today, software graphics programs like Adobe Illustrator are also based on a mathematical vector foundation, where ‘vectors’ are geometric coordinates that form computer graphics.

While computer art and associated software has experienced exponential advancements  since Whitney’s inventions we are reminded of his contributions through the default pattern imagery in Media Player.  By no means is this retrospective of John Whitney comprehensive, it does highlight some of his major influences that contributed towards his explorations and inventions in computer art – forays which were the impetus, however small, for graphic developments since.

Of equal significance are his intellectual contributions on theorising the emerging role of the computer in fields of art. A fitting summation of his fundamental position being

 ‘…I am on the side of Joseph Weizenbaum…as to whether or not computers will “…write really good music or draw highly meaningful pictures…” Flatly I will express aloud my disbelief at the implication of these words. Computers will do no such thing, of themselves – not ever! Indeed art is a matter of , “judgement – not calculation.” (Whitney 1980, p.124)



References


Bolter. J.D. & Grusin, R.A. (1999) Remediation: Understanding New Media, Cambridge, Mass; London: MIT Press p.15

Darley, Andrew. 2000. ‘A Back Story: Realism, Simulation, Interaction’ in Andrew Darley. Visual Digital Culture: Surface Play and Spectacle in New Media Genres, London and New York: Routeldge, p.13

Le Grice.Malcolm (1974)  Computer Film as Film Art in Computer Animation, Focal Press p.p 161-168. Retrieved from http://www.luxonline.org.uk/articles/computer_film(1).html

Whitney.J (1980) Digital Harmony On the Complementarity of Music and Visual Art, Byte Books; University of Michigan p.21, 22, 29, 30, 31, 38, 124

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