SIGGRAPH 1990: Digital Image-Digital Cinema

• Richard Wright

This informal paper studies the effects of the recent introduction of computer-generated imagery on the practice of science and its function in understanding the world. It intends to introduce the subject of computerized visualization for scientific purposes into a wider debate, to show the diversity of issues involved-scientific, cultural and philosophical-and to build a context in which they can be critiqued. The author seeks to show the variety of scientific imaging and its influences on scientific knowledge; as both experiments and results are increasingly expressed in terms of imagery, the image assumes an integrity of its own and the object to which it refers becomes obscured. This leads to a shift of focus away from abstract theory as the embodiment of knowledge to the ascension of an allegorical image-based science with computer graphics as its natural language.

• Beverly J. Jones

New forms of art and technology are frequently cast in the mode of old forms, just as other aspects of material and symbolic culture have been. Only when these new forms become available to the larger population can they affect cultural patterns of maintenance and change. The author traces the evolution from alphanumeric hard copy, static and dynamic screen images, through objects and events that are not screen-based, to dynamic, interactive, multi-sensory output. The effects of origins and prior practices in both technology and art on form, content, material, technique, meaning and purpose of computer graphics are explored. Speculation regarding possible and probable futures are raised.

• Timothy Binkley

Computer imagery is fraught with divers conundrums and paradoxes associated with the fact that it is both abstract and concrete. It confounds familiar ways of understanding appearance and reality. We can begin to resolve the perplexity by using the idea of recursion to contrast digital imaging with picturing. It is particularly useful to explore the concept of an interface and to study its role in the imaging system. Digital images cannot be understood outside the context of the complete interactive system in which they occur.

• Roger F. Malina

Computers are transforming existing art forms and allowing new kinds of art forms to be developed. Because the computer is primarily a machine for processing information, not a machine for making objects, it provides a malleable medium that provides the artist with a large variety of tools for manipulating sense data. The work that contains the result of the artist’s creativity is the software and the data, not any particular image or output produced using that software. The ultimate goal of artmaking using computers, in this light, is not to create art objects but to create dynamic art subjects, to produce families of aesthetically interesting outputs, or art performances, which are as different from each other as possible within the constraints of the software. This situates computer art within a larger context of the study and development of artificial life. To create significant artworks of this type, it will be necessary to improve the computer’s capacity to be an autonomous artmaking subject; this will require the extension of the computer’s senses, the expansion of its capabilities, and means for the computer to provide sensory inputs to the human nervous system and to other computers.

• Susan Kirchman

The SIGGRAPH 1990 Art Show Committee decided to sponsor an exhibition of works that concentrate on the interaction of photographic imagery and computer technology [1]. This exhibition came about because of one interesting aspect of computer-mediated artworks that has been developing over the last several years. As the curator of this exhibition, I chose to put together a group of works that investigate not only the technical combination of these media but also the conceptual basis for choosing such tools of investigation, collaboration and production.

• John Andrew Berton Jr.

This article examines the role that theories of photographic cinema play in the criticism of digital cinema. The theories of Georges Melies, Vachel Lindsay, Lev Kuleshov, Andre Bazin and Rudolf Arnheim-critics, theoreticians and filmmakers, the key-stones of this work-have proven pertinent to the advancing technology of other cinematic forms. Their ideas have applicability to specific aspects of digital cinema, including the manipulation of illusory space, discrete and explicit control of cinematic elements, the transformation of world spaces into screen space and the role of realistic imagery in determining the content of a cinematic work. Parallels can be drawn between the ideas of these theorists, most of whom wrote during the infancy of photographic cinema, on the developing state of film and that of current digital cinema.

• Michael Ester

Improving the quality of digital images can have great impact on information storage and transfer, pushing the feasibility of image databases well beyond existing practical limits. How good do images have to be? Among the considerations for selecting image quality is the extent to which viewers can discriminate among variations in quality. What differences in resolution and dynamic range (bit-depth) can they see? Groups of art historians were asked to rate a series of displayed test images; the results show how participants’ responses compared with the actual range of image quality. Practical implications of viewers’ perceptions are discussed.

• Rudolf Arnheim

The following short excerpt from Film [1] is all but unknown to the readers of the English version of the book as well as to those of the other translations. The edition of 1957, titled Film As Art [2], on which all these translations are based, was prepared by the author in the conviction that only the essential sections, dealing with the nature of the visual medium, were still relevant whereas much of what had been observed in the infancy days of the sound film was no longer worth saying. A complete English version of the German original of 1932 had been published in 1933 by Faber and Faber in London in a translation by L. M. Sieveking and Ian F. D. Morrow but has vanished of course long ago even from most libraries. The following few pages, slightly retouched by the author, will give today’s readers a taste of the principles that governed discussions of the media in those early days.

• Peter Voci

Working with the New York State Police and the Nassau County Medical Examiners Office, a forensic anthropologist, a forensic medical photographer and an imaging systems artist attempted to reconstruct a face from the skull of a young woman. Facial feature components selected from police identification kits were digitized and manipulated to match control points and overlaid onto a digitized version of the skull. In this way a series of images was created that were called ‘not-art’ even though an artistic aspect was present.

• Brian Evans

To structure time with abstract visual materials requires a visual grammar of line, shape and color. Color is especially problematic, difficult to measure in all but the simplest applications; the literature of color theory and harmony is often confusing. To devise a syntax for structuring time with color, one can turn to the concepts of tension-release, of neutral, balanced and weighted color domains and of discrete computer raster images; they help to create and measure time-based color compositions. In para-metrically defined color palettes, Color Study #7 (a computer-generated animated film) demonstrates the application of these ideas to a simple and effective compositional approach. Codifying this now common film-making practice, the author hopes to encourage others interested in aesthetically strengthened visual presentation to explore and develop time-based visual grammars.