Gene Youngblood

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Writings and Presentations:


  • Title: Cinema and the Code
    Writing Type: Paper
    Author(s):
    Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1989: Art Show
    Abstract Summary:

    The author and his colleagues suggest a criterion for evaluating artistic achievement in the medium of the digital moving image as distinct from other forms of cinema. This criterion is the extent to which the formal possibilities of digital imaging are employed as syntactical or linguistic elements, not simply as ‘special effects’. Four digital imaging techniques are discussed as possibilities for a new syntax and, hence, for the expansion of cinematic language.

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    Title: A Medium Matures: The Myth of Computer Art
    Writing Type: Essay
    Author(s):
    Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1983: Art Show
    Abstract Summary:

    We embark upon SIGGRAPH’s second decade with a growing conviction that the leading edge of culture us no longer defined by the fine arts community — by what’s being shown in galleries, purchased by museums, published in art magazines or talked about in SoHo lofts. The excitement and power and significance today seems to lie in electronic technology, especially the computer, which we are convinced will reveal the way to unlimited new aesthetic horizons and produce wholly new art forms. And yet the idea of computer art — of an art unique to the computer — remains after twenty years an unrealized myth, its horizons barely in view, its forms still to be manifest. For, ironically, most of what is understood as computer art today represents the computer in the service of  those very same visual art traditions which the rhetoric of new technology holds to be obsolete.

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    Title: Toward Autonomous Reality Communities: A Future For Computer Graphics
    Writing Type: Essay
    Author(s):
    Exhibition: SIGGRAPH 1982: Art Show ’82
    Abstract Summary:

    It may live in a vacuum tube (for a few more years at least), but to hear the Mercantile Masters talk you’d think computer graphics lives in a political vacuum as well. For electronics, however, the last quarter-century has been equivalent to pulling back the string on a bow – the storing of enormous technological potential. Now the string is about to be released in the universal application of that technology: the next 25 years will be the flight of the arrow, propelling us into the Electronic Age and precipitating an historically unprecedented revolution in commu­nications. And in the shadow of the Communica­tions Revolution we begin to understand the awesome cultural and political implications of that protean force we refer to so feebly today as computer graphics.

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