visual effects
12:22 | 25-12-2011 | Science, Technology | No Comments
как оказалось, замечательнейший человек, ученый и художник:
Desmond Paul Henry (1921–2004) was a Manchester University Lecturer and Reader in Philosophy (1949–82) and was one of the first few British artists to experiment with machine-generated visual effects at the time of the emerging global computer art movement of the 1960s.
словами Брюса Стерлинга, “his biography is straight out of Pynchon’s GRAVITY’S RAINBOW”:
In 1939, with the prospect of war, Henry volunteered for the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers, where he was employed for seven years as a Technical Clerk. Henry’s stay in the army encouraged him to develop experimental art making processes, including an unique finger-rubbing technique using duplicator ink, boot polish and even soot!
The army also further fuelled his passion for technology and enabled him to become acquainted with the predictor systems in anti-aircraft guns which were the ‘mirror-image’ of those he would later find in his beloved Bombsights.
и так далее:
The bombsight computers, from which Henry constructed these machines in his home-based workshop in Manchester, were employed in World War Two Bomber Aircraft to calculate the accurate release of bombs onto their target. He combined these computers with other components to create electronically-operated drawing machines which relied mainly on a ‘mechanics of chance’. This meant the drawing machines could not be pre-programmed or store information as in a conventional computer; nor were they precision instruments.
As a result, Henry had only general overall control but at the same time he could intervene to direct the course of image production at any given moment of his choosing. This spontaneous interactive element of his machines pre-empted by some twenty years similar interactive features of contemporary graphic manipulation software. Today not one drawing machine remains intact.
о, да.