Wes Jenkins, a catch-all media industry veteran, gives us a flash of the past in the first part in his mini-history of interactive media artists. “A full knowledge of art (drawing, perspective, color theory, layout and anatomy) was critical. Typically, these skills were gained by a long stretch in art school and the associated drinking.”

I’ve been an artist for close to half a century.

In 1976 I graduated from the San Francisco Academy of Art and I’ve been an artist since day one in 1952, despite my parents’ objections and advice from groan-ups. “Artists don’t make any money and they drink too much.”

As a kid I drank too much: milk, juice, even Yoo-Hoo.

I couldn’t help it. I was an artist.

Since then, my fortuitous career has taken me in directions that I could never have imagined; from NASA to Zappa, from Disney to LEGO, from ABC to PBS, from IBM to MCA, from Mindscape to Sierra, from Stanford University to the California Academy of Sciences, and from Bill Graham to Neil Bush. I’ve had a high profile and a pro-active role in over a dozen interactive products and so I write these run-on sentences not as an introduction to me but more accurately to give some credibility to this article that you are reading.

I will warn you that this history of interactive media arts is from my perspective. By no means am I social historian, scientist, or member of an august body of academia. In fact, when I typed the word “academia” I misspelled it. Spell check came up with macadamia. What a nut!

Compared to now, the media technology of the 1950’s through the 70’s was like blacksmithing: everything was forged by hand. State of the Art meant room-sized graphic cameras, typesetting machines, and printing presses. Getting your art from concept to completion involved using a T-square, X-acto blades (#11), and the waxer. For you kids, a waxer was a device that would roll wax on the back side of a type galley. This was very exciting since we no longer had to use messy rubber cement glue and volatile acetone thinner. The studio was cleaner but we were sober; no longer sniffing solvent.

By the way, graphic artists from this era can be spotted by a finely chiseled index finger, the result of too many X-acto mishaps.

Likewise, in Illustration, everything had to be done from scratch.

A full knowledge of art (drawing, perspective, color theory, layout and anatomy) was critical. Typically, these skills were gained by a long stretch in art school and the associated drinking.

As technology changed, there was a renaissance of the arts in every aspect of pop culture.

The dichotomy of demographics through this rapidly changing era produced styles as divergent as Swiss Design to Psychedelia.

Swiss Design was a meticulously focused style born from the Bauhaus movement of the 1930’s. Ironically, Psychedelia also had roots in the Bauhaus through the surrealist movement. Swiss design was a rational approach and the typeface Helvetica is a good example of it. Designed for simplicity, versatility and readability, its creation required a deep understanding and empathy for the art and science of typography, form, and function which in turn required knowing what and who is your audience.

There was nothing that even closely resembled interactivity in the mid 70’s. It was all about art. (The author recommends a tiny novel called Cheese Monkeys. It’s about art school in the 50’s but still there are some very relevant concepts in there for today.) Most of us fantasized about a magic wand that could do gradations and do it over again if you wanted to check out a different color or layout. An “undo” button was just sheer fantasy so we got back to work. Everything was done by hand; cutting frisket (a sticky film mask) after frisket to airbrush a small shape. It was time consuming. In answer to our wish to that mythical “Undo” button became the digital revolution.

My first introduction to the world of digital art was a system called Genigraphics. Developed by a General Electric, it was a presentation slide machine. That was 1977. The Genigraphic was like a very primitive Adobe Illustrator. Images were created vertice by vertice. Circles were attempted only by the boldest and patient of artists. One vertix had to touch another vertix. For illustration, it was very clunky but very text friendly. For the artist it was thrilling to have the typesetter’s power at their disposal while using layout skills. However, interactivity was just a dream and equally improbable.

At the dawn my career, one way into the graphic arts, was by becoming a staff production artist. When it came to training operators for these new clunky digital tools, traditionally trained artists were the safest bet. But as the digital arts progressed, thousands of extremely talented folk fell by the wayside. It was much more economical to ditch the artist and teach the graphic program to the office typist; they cost less, had no opinions and could really crank out the copy.

I lucked out.

After Genigraphics, I was hired by Stanford University which was riding the first wave of digital art and they had a Genigraphics computer.

But I just looked at the clock on the wall and see that it’s time for a digression.

Now, I often ask myself and anybody who will listen, “Why does everybody call the digital world New Media?” It’s been around for at least 30 years and then I discovered that my supposition was wildly inaccurate…It’s been around for 57 years!

The first interactive game designed to be played on the TV was invented by Ralph Baer in 1951. Sheesh, I’m just a gleam in my parents’ eyes. He was an engineer instructed to develop the best TV ever. He started messing around with simple games. His employers were not amused. Ralph was ordered to knock it off. “Nobody would be interested in playing a game on TV! Get back to work.”

Further research blew me out even more. Check out this continued brief history:

1954: SEGA, short for SErvice GAmes formed. They designed and built mechanical slot-machine games.

1972: Magnavox finally starts producing the games of Ralph Baer from the 50’s, 21 years later. Atari starts building arcade games. Vector Graphics releases Space Wars.

Back to the Farm…

Stanford University had a consortium for digital animation and art. When I was hired, for development companies to participate, they had to pay ransom in order to have the highly coveted Stanford Logo emblazoned on their product. These companies supplied the consortium with their equipment to test. The computers that we had access to were mainframes by Evans and Sutherlin, Iris, Bosch and beta prototype PCs.

The Stanford administration would then throw engineers and artists into this computer filled room, lock the door and say, “See you in a year.” A bit of an exaggeration, granted, but we were charged to find out what these puppies could do without breaking them… too much. Our progress on projects was periodically monitored so the developers could evaluate any software or hardware problems.
It took weeks to create a simple sphere but we were making headway.

My time and lifeblood was devoured by the Bosch FGS 4000, a 3D animation system. Yes, Bosch, the makers of fine sparkplugs. Bosch had only one competitor; the high quality, justly named, Cray Super Computer. We had the Bosch.

It had the most confusing jury rigged interface created by an infinite number of chimps working in every computer language known to mankind, specifically designed that every command worked at cross purposes. When it did cooperate, it was all coordinate based, in other words, 3d vertices. You would chart them out on an X, Y, and Z grid. For example; 7, 4, and 8 would be one point on a line. It would take a whole batch of these numbers to create anything. I began to regret my background as an artist and I began to think I should have become a mathematician, in order to do art. We struggled to make shapes; simple shapes. Anything, so we could make something. It took weeks to make a simple sphere.

To add insult to injury, the Bosch’s hard-drive filled a room downstairs. Down there you had to be boot up the hard drive then run upstairs where the station was located. To render a single frame of video took about 20 minutes. You couldn’t see what you had created until you rendered out a frame. After 1 or 2 frames were rendered, the system would crash. Repeat the sequence… Crash, shutdown, hit the stairs boot-up, hit the stairs, render… The plus was plenty of cardiovascular exercise.

A painful example of several frames from a several month Bosch project.

One of the less taxing effects was to create a 2D square, hit the extrude-key and presto, changeo! You have a cube.

One of the best examples of Bosch’s prowess was the early MTV music video for Dire Straits, “Money for Nothing.” They actually used the power of the Bosch really well and not a curve in sight.

Every day brought a fresh Bosch hell, but my favorite one was when the air conditioning went down and the mainframe was over-heating. A brilliant but not common sense challenged engineering graduate student placed a block of dry ice and a table fan on a chair in front of the Bosch. The dry ice condensed any water vapor in the room and the fan sprayed it into the machine all night long. When we showed up in the morning…

The screen was dripping. Someone shouted, “Splash-screen.” Now I don’t know whether that was the birth of that term but I like to think so.

There were only four Bosch’s worldwide at around a half a million a pop. I and a friend of mine would moonlight in Hollywood, where another machine was chugging away. It was as hellish as the painting by Hieronymus Bosch.

During this time, I was championing 3D animation and digital art to senior administrators. To this day I’m slapping my face silly because if I believed in the future of this industry that much, why didn’t I buy stock? I could be jolly rich by now. When I sulk about this, my wife always reminds me that we were artists and had no money…True, but I had a computer.

Eventually nearly every home had a computer; a Mac or a PC.

The PC was the industry standard back then (70-80’s.)

Mac’s were considered toys, not yet ready for prime time. Thus began the war between PC and Mac. That war, like the Hatfield and the McCoy’s, remains to this day. It was 1988. The first skirmish was The Operator Friendly Wars.

All PC functions at the time were in DOS. You had to type some odd letters in to access the art program that you needed.

Mac’s won the ease of use battle. Illustrator was the first Mac software that we easily taught ourselves. At first, it was hard to adjust to different hand – eye -coordination but soon enough we all felt comfortable; comfortable enough to make mistakes and learn. Illustrator was very much like the Genigraphics only this program had Bezier curves. It made your art more like you intended. There were better results. The bar was being raised.

Most companies, outside the game industry, owned a Mac in the late 80’s. Museums were presenting simple interactive computer kiosks with a Macintosh. Most all print work and separations was Mac based. PC answered the challenge with windows.

A needed niche, due to the Bosch demise, was a user-friendly 3D system.

All major stand-alone 3D systems failed one at a time.

One such system called Symbolics appeared with another try at 3D. This one acted like a ball of Silly Putty. You pinched and pulled vertices to the desired shape. It too was short lived.

Meanwhile, PC and Macintoshes were developing new and increasingly technological software. As artists, we were required to learn them all.

But that’s not all the insight Wes has! Tune in next week for the more game-specific portion of his mini-history of interactive media artists.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 21st, 2008 at 9:55 pm and is filed under Art, INSPIRATION. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.