Salon 90 // Origins Part One

Hi. My name is Michael Pierre Price. I'm an artist out of Phoenix, Arizona. Today is January second, 2025. And this is Techspressionism, Salon number 90, with the title called Origins. I wanted to make a few remarks before we actually begin with our presenters today. One of the things, I think, is really important about Techspressionism that I've long held is that a significant part of the Techspressionist community is the lived history. Especially with the early days of technology based art making that a number of our artists in our group actually experienced. And that's what we'll be discussing today. Some of those. Things that the artist presenters have lived through and what they got to witness for many of our presenting artists. These formative years in the rise of technology, especially digital technology spans from as early as the 1960s and 70s into the transformative decade of the 1980s.

Michael Pierre Price

What's also important to remember is that we're talking about all of this unfolding prior to the Internet. As we know it, there was no web at that point. That we had access to and could use one of the things. I think we're lucky enough in this expressionism. Community is the wealth of artists who can speak to these early days of technology. And we're presenting the origin salon in actually 2 parts, one today. And then in the following February salon on the 6th of February.

Michael Pierre Price

I want to personally thank Steve Miller for sharing his insights with me. While I was formulating this concept of the Origin Salon, because Steve relayed to me that we should really see this as an important historical record, not only of the artist who will be presenting, but also contextually, as a prehistory of Techspressionism. And it's really neat, because I think those early days are now reflected into today's text artists worldwide, who are using things like augmented reality. VR AI nfts web 3 and much more.

Michael Pierre Price

So without further ado, Steve, I'd like to welcome you as our 1st presenter today.

Thank you, Michael. Let's see, here we are. You can see my screen, and we will.

Steve Miller

Start the slideshow in a second. Here.

Steve Miller

Okay, here we go. So thank you for your patience. Thank you for the invite. And you know, since we are talking about prehistory, my prehistory starts before technology. And it really started with reading philosophy and a lot of people at that time. My group in New York. This is in the eighties we were reading the Frankfurt School of philosophers. That's Adorno, Marcuse, Horkheimer. And we were, you know, thinking about what was the nature of the world and what was the role of art in it, and one person that I just really resonated with was someone called Jean Baudrillard, who I eventually became friends with when I was living in Paris, and I'm in a couple of his books.

Steve Miller

But this one, The Mirror Production, is one of his earlier books, and to, you know, give a synopsis of that book in a sense or 2. Basically, you know what Baudrillard said was the reason why Marxism failed? Is it because it used the language of capitalism to describe itself. So it really made me think about kind of new systems that were going on in the world at that time. And you know, what were those systems about? Again there was no Internet, as Michael said, analyzing reality. And I saw this thing pop up like the 1st barcode right when that 1st came in, which is in the early eighties. Something, of course, we all take for granted.

Steve Miller

But at the same time I was looking at that barcode in relationship to human value in production. And you know, this is a painting that from 1982, which was the start of me really thinking about some form of technology, but certainly not computers. And you know Baudrillard was. He read a lot of books I've read most of them. And the other thing that he sort of pointed out to me, that resonated with me was that Reality was partially informed by language which I talked about. You know, with the 1st book, and then that our reality was mediated by, you know, an endless series of images through which language and images that we interpreted the world.

Steve Miller

And a lot of people know about metro pictures and that sort of early pictures culture. And so I was literally thinking about language. Here we have. And this was high technology, the Ibm Selectric ball, which is laughable right now. But this is, you know, a large painting. And I needed it to be to be large, and was thinking about both this notion of language and technology. But I hadn't quite evolved to, you know, some of the thinking that I have now. But it's sort of like how I get to. You know, these early days of prehistory looking at the world through images, looking at this new kind of computerized language that was like really fascinating to me, the advent of video games. And this was all something that was like making me look harder.

Steve Miller

There's another person that was very, very important to me, which was Michel Foucault, who was a French philosopher, and he wrote this book called Discipline and Punishment. Not a very popular book, maybe, and not a very positive title. But what he was looking at was images of what were the images of power. And you know we have this notion that the fortress right the evil castle right? You couldn't penetrate that. What was what was going on behind those walls was the center of power, and he was looking at this prison design, and in this case the guard towers in the center of the prison, and every cell has a window on the other side, and through looking at the shadow of the of the prisoner through the window you could see everybody all the time. And these people, you know, the prisoners didn't know if they were being looked at or not. So this idea that the impenetrable, impenetrable nature of power. Sorry I'm losing my voice here power became this image of transparency. So with this ability to view, now we have cameras everywhere. But at this time this is the start of being looked at.

Steve Miller

And so he wrote this essay called the Panopticon, and it was really about the transparency of power. And this was like my 1st digital digitized image right, which was an eyeball. But this was me kind of exploring this early visual language of technology and looking at the transparency of power, how language systems communicate. And then one of his most influential books was called The Archaeology of Knowledge, and in it. He. Foucault, looks at developments going from the Renaissance and looking at Renaissance, molding the 1st cast moldings instead of carving everything by hand, and we start to see. You know the idea of new, of repetition, of being able to mechanic, mechanic, mechanize creativity, and the end of the book ends up kind of at the turn of the century, a little bit past, and looking at the relationship of culture, the advent of the train bringing people from the from the countryside to the city, and this kind of new language in visual arts called cubism, and in this case a violin, which was also considered a kind of surrogate for the female form, and this notion that all relationships were being rearranged by these new innovations in science and technology. So that really made me wonder, like, what were the systems that were generating images?

Steve Miller

In the culture today. So I was looking at fine art. And you know, this is a piece by Stella from 1959. And if you don't know these black paintings, most people do. You know, he put a grid down? Very simple, right? He x'd out a certain area of the canvas, you know, and that center, horizontal single is the width of one brush stroke. And then he just mechanically did those 3 inch brush strokes all across the canvas. And I thought, This is interesting, because, you know, I was recognizing that computers were systems, and that computers could generate images. And in this case it's a an image from the warhead of an intercontinental ballistic missile that was mapping out the landscape to go to its target zone. So these are not images that I had invented. They were images that I was just responding to and putting them together in paintings.

Steve Miller

And then you know, the final book of many books, but that I'm showing today. Wittgenstein was also looking at language. And he wrote an essay about the arbitrary nature of language and he was looking at the color white, and thinking about all the different ways. You could have snow, white, ivory, white winter, white cream, white and this was really influential for Jasper Johns. So now we're getting back to the you know the language question again. So you know what's interesting about this particular painting. You can see in one section almost to the left, you see The word white painted in the color red on top of the color orange. So you have this like, really.

Steve Miller

You know, very visually clear notion about the arbitrary nature of language. Right? You still read it as orange, whether it's painted in white, and this sort of disassociation between the thing that signified and the signifier. So that's the stuff that got me into this technology game. And then I started actually making images. And this is an image. You know again looking at. I'm looking at Cuba's, and I'm going like, Wow, I really wished I lived in that time, because this invention of this new language really like excited me, and I was wondering well, what would be the next thing that would be. You know the new kind of language system for my time. And even in 1984, I knew it was going to be. Technology. And I was thinking then, artificial intelligence. So this image took about 3 h to create. In 1984 on a graphics computer used for ABC sports at Peter Caesar video. And the computer was the size of my kitchen, and it took about that time just to pixelize an image. So this was the start of me. You know this is something we could do in Photoshop in a nanosecond right? But this is how slow and trudging it was. But I just wanted to see if I could pixelate this landscape and turn it into kind of an average images of averages right? Each area got averaged, and there you got to be the block of the image. So.

Steve Miller

Looking at cubism and thinking like man. I really wish I could think about how the new technology of new graphics and averaging areas with pixels could be combined with this. You know, kind of reverie, and, you know, dream of being in another period than the one I was. It was like, it's like the woody Allen film where he is in the Cubist area, and his partner is the person he envies is in the ballet poke, and so they can never meet.

Steve Miller

So here I am now, actually, you know, creating images, looking at this, using computers, but taking a really long time to like generate these images. And this is where I can wrap up a little bit and talk about Techspressionism. So The notion about Techspressionism is that one of the aspects of creativity as the ability to be expressionistic to have expressionism. And you see, expressionist work, and maybe, like de kooning, maybe earlier in someone like soutine, you know. That's this idea that the quality of the material of paint can be an expressive mode. And Titian also understood this too. And you know the late 14 hundreds in his in his late work, which approached kind of abstraction.

Steve Miller

So this notion that the quality of the material could actually be a motive made me think about. Well. How do you do this if you're looking at technology? So I took the Rorschach blot and I decided to photograph it, put it on a computer and silk screen it on the canvas. And the idea about the Rorschach blot is that it's a piece of paint. We all know the folded piece of paper and the old. Open it, and you have a new image, and I thought, like, well, these images are scientifically proven to test, you know, on some level, your mental state of mind, your emotional state of mind. So here I was using technology to represent something that represented the ability to data point human emotions and put it on the canvas.

Steve Miller

And you know I love this. You know, this is like these are early computers. You might recognize the sidebar, the tool notion on the you know the side of the computer where the toolbar was in those days. And you could, you know, scroll up and down that toolbar to get to where you want? Not in like a dropdown menu today in most toolbars? So this is another Rorschach a block block silk screen down the canvas, and you get this idea that some people might see the 2 women, you know, looking at each other, and that means maybe you're healthy, and maybe they use this in forensic pathology. So you might be coming up for parole. And you get this test, and you see 2 people murdering another with blood all over the place. Well, you might not get parole if you're in that data set. So I really love the idea that we had a piece of paint that could actually be a data point for human emotions. So that's kind of the start of the early Techspressionism, this journey, and this is just the final image Of looking at Code. This is me putting a couple of Rorschach blots on top of each other, emphasizing, you know, they're photographed off a screen. So looking at the intervention of technology and the raster lines on the screen, this sort of get that notion that this is a technological interpretation of human emotions. So that's the start of me using Fine art and paint to you know. Approach these ideas that got me towards where we are with expressionism right now.

Steve Miller

So with that, I'll turn it over to the next person if I can. Oh, there you go! Stop share. Thank you, Michael.

Steve Miller

I think you're on mute, Michael.

Thanks. That was really good presentation, Steve. I really appreciate it. Alright. Next up we have Darcy.

How come? I'm not seeing my screen. Gene.

Darcy Gerbarg

Your presentation is this, and then click share. I did that. Okay.

Darcy Gerbarg

Hi, I'm Darcy Gerbarg, the latest tools of my time. In the late 1970s I believed that the leading artists of each generation were using the latest tools of their time for making art. I was married to a pioneer digital music composer, Robert Paul Mason, and we had just built the Rpm Sound recording studio at 12 East 12th Street in New York City. This prompted me to go out and find the latest art making tools for the visual arts. I quickly discovered Ruth Levitt's book and contacted some of the artists in it. I also found out that computer graphics and digitally controlled video were the newest art tools being developed.

Darcy Gerbarg

I was a painter, so moving images didn't interest me. When I saw Alvi Ray Smith's paper on the Color Cube, I realized that it was possible to use computers to make paintings with color. I called Alvi up, and he told me about siggraph, which I attended for the 1st time in 1979. The field was very small, and I found myself included in local computer art events where I met many of the local, really early pioneers. At that time there were 3 computer graphics companies, slash research groups in the New York New Jersey area, New York Institute of Technology, Nyit Magi, synthivision and digital effects.

Darcy Gerbarg

Plus at, and T. And Ibm as well as Cornell, Syracuse, Columbia, and Nyu Universities. In the 1960s and 70s. Most of the people making pictures with computers were engineers working in large companies, including Ibm at and T. Xerox. Parc, Evans and Sutherland, or at University engineering research centers. As an aside I grew up in an Ibm town, and my father was one of the 1st people in the mid 1960 S. To have an Ibm minicomputer in his office, which I used. So I certainly wasn't afraid of computers.

Darcy Gerbarg

These engineers, the term computer scientist, wasn't in use yet, didn't call themselves artists, but they nonetheless were making interesting, creative 2 and 3D moving and still images with computers. There were almost no artists with access to these advanced computer systems and no artists who had programming skills. The printing industry was already using computers and had their own systems mostly for typesetting. Barbara Nessam got access to one of these and was able to make art with it.

Darcy Gerbarg

During this time some very interesting early work in storytelling was also being done with computers at the BBC. In Europe there were a couple artists making pictures with computers. A few universities in the us. Had computer engineering programs where they were developing new computer hardware and software capabilities. Very few artists had access to early computer imaging technologies. In these labs, however, those computer scientists and programmers who were interested in computer graphics had usually studied some art, taken a few art classes and come from a family of artists and or made art themselves.

Darcy Gerbarg

There are also many people programming small hobby type computers writing their own software for a variety of purposes, including drawing pictures. Since 1981, the Sigref Conference has hosted its annual art shows, which, as you know, I started for them, and which they claim showcase some of the world's most innovative and creative digital artworks. This was certainly true in the early days when some of the images were created as artworks, and some were produced as demonstrations of programming breakthroughs From the 1960s through the 1980s, and it can be argued into the early 2 thousands. With one or 2 exceptions, the art and computer worlds were completely separate.

Darcy Gerbarg

Covid can be credited with changing this in 2020, which is only 5 years ago. In the 1970s and 80s, the 2 main areas of research in computer graphics were the creation of increasingly realistic computer images, mostly for 3D. Animation and the real-time rendering of 3D. Computer objects and terrain mostly for the military Animated and 3D movies and gaming. At this time there were no full color archival printers. The highest quality output was on one inch or 2 inch computer tape 35 still, or movie film and lying drawing plotters, some with a few colors.

Darcy Gerbarg

In 1979, at Sigref, in Chicago I met the Senior Research Engineers at New York Institute of Technology, and I was invited to use Avory Ray Smith's 20 four-bit paint system. The only full color paint system at that time I had taken a programming class as an undergraduate student at University of Pennsylvania in the late 1960s, using punch guards. Later I took a unix class at Berkeley, and then I set in on Garland Stern's programming class at Nyit. It was clear to me that I was never going to be as good a programmer as the programmers at Nyit, especially Tom Duff.

Darcy Gerbarg

I was delighted to use and explore the functionality of Alvi's pain system. By then I had been painting large abstract paintings with golden acrylic paint for almost 10 years, and had studied at the New York Studio School on 8th Street, in Manhattan, where I worked for the model 5 days a week and copied at the met. The great painters I knew in New York did not have to make their own tools or their own paint. Golden paint was in the forefront of developing acrylic paint for artists, and it was wonderful to use.

Darcy Gerbarg

I wasn't going to grind my own pigments or weave my own canvas, which I could readily purchase. I was using the most advanced tools for making digital paintings on computers and did not have to program them myself. The sophisticated tools available on the paint system I was using, and the future systems I would use were the perfect tools for me. There was no need for me to write software, which would only have been a much less sophisticated set of digital tools that said I did consult for people and companies developing paint systems, including the custom paint system that Jean Miller wrote for me in the mid 1980s. So some of the paint system. Capabilities that I wanted were written to my specifications.

Darcy Gerbarg

I would say that my focus as an artist was to explore creative ways, to make art using digital technology and to get my paintings out of the computer into physical mediums. I like to explore and exploit the capabilities of the digital paint systems I used. I was always interested in color and where color sat in space and was always developing and looking for ways to take my images created on monitors out of the computer into physical media. For years I was almost alone in this important quest.

Darcy Gerbarg

In 1970. Into 1980, I developed a photographic technique to put my digital image separations onto zinc plates to print viscosity etchings at Krishna, Reddy's Nyu studio in 1980. I did 3 M. Scanner murals with 3 M. Which they exhibited at Sigriff that year in the mid 1980 S. As an artist in the new works and Clay projects. At Syracuse University I started using silkscreen glazes to put my digital images on ceramic tiles which were exhibited at the Everson Museum.

Darcy Gerbarg

Also, in the mid 1980s I created carpet tiles at Milliken. Carpet produced formica tiles at Formica, and did a ceramic tile project at Mitsuka Chemical Company in Japan in the early 1980s, I bought a Dunn Film recorder which became part of my custom 20 four-bit s. 100 bus custom computer graphics system in my Chelsea loft it output to 35 and 8 by 10 film and had a 16 movie camera attachment. When Polaroid commissioned some large color prints of my digital paintings for an exhibition. They sent me many boxes of their 4 by 5 transparency film. I had to rent and learn to use a 4 by 5 Bellows camera, which I also mounted on the Done Film Recorder. That was a lot of fun. I find it interesting that in the last few years it has occurred to the newer digital artists and curators that, taking digital images into physical media is important.

Darcy Gerbarg

In the 1960s and 70s there were a few husband-wife teams in which one partner was a programmer and the other was an artist. Joan Truckenbrood and her husband, Clyde Kimball, Ruth and Jay Levitt Colette and Charles Bangert and my husband Gene, who was in the mid 1980s, the Vp. Of technology at Magi synthivision, and I,. Brigham Young, developed a 3D animation program movie Byu, which I ran and taught on my custom computer graphics system in my loft in New York City. Starting in the early 1980, S.

Darcy Gerbarg

Gene Miller wrote a custom 24 bit paint system for me, which I ran on an S 100 bus computer and which I used for many years. This was before Ibm and Apple Pcs. Had full color. In 1980 I began teaching computer art classes at Tisch School of the Arts, new York University. In the mid 80 Si created and directed the 1st Mfa program in Computer Art at the School of Visual Arts. I also started the computer art classes at Suny Stony Brook. From the beginning I used film as what I called a transfer medium to get my paintings out of the computer. I projected my slides onto wall-sized canvases, mixed the same colors in golden acrylic and airbrushed my large paintings on canvas.

Darcy Gerbarg

I had huge silk screens made with a variety of computer separations, and screened or airbrushed through the screens to make paintings on canvas or monographs on paper. I had stencils cut of digitally painted separations on commercially available digital plotters, and used them to make layered acrylic paintings. In the mid 1980s, when Clement Greenberg created some of my paintings in my studio. His comment was, go light! This led me to work in the lighter color palette. He was not intimidated, and did not write off the art that I was making with the use of computers for the 1st Sigrif Art Show catalog in 1982, the Museum director, curator, and author, Cynthia Goodman, who had written a book on Hoffman students, was courageous enough to look at and write about art made with computers. She later mounted the 1st major digital art exhibition.

Darcy Gerbarg

Finally, really large, excellent, full color archival quality printers became available. In 2016 I started buying bolts of printable canvas and printing my digital paintings, myself on 72 inch and 45 inch wide color printers. As a note, Harold Cohen was a known artist in 1973, when he started developing his drawing machine program named Aaron. For years he continued developing Aaron, using it to control a plotter that could meander over a large flat surface making digitally printed images. However, when these large-scale quality full-color printers became available, Harold also printed his works, using them. When I started painting in 3 Dvr. In 2016, I quickly found that I was creating images that I would never have created without the use of computers. Many of the paintings I created this way surprised me. I didn't know what to make of them, and I was afraid to show them to anybody.

Darcy Gerbarg

Fortunately for me, the renowned critic, author, and Curator Karen Wilkin visited my studio and gave me her opinion of some of my 36 by 60 inch paintings on canvas. Her comment was that they were strong, which was enough not to discourage me. Today I print my digital paintings on canvas and enhance them with the AR sculptures that they are created from for historical information that you can rely on. I refer you to Joshua Reichardt's cyberdatic serendipity, the computer in the art, 1969, Ruth Levitt, artist in computer 1976, Cynthia Goodman, digital visions, computers, and art. 1987, Abby Ray Smith, a biography of the Pixel, 2021, Bonnie Mitchell and Jen Serrelman, directors, the Sigriff Archo Archives. Thank you very much.

Fantastic Presentation. Darcy.

Thank you.

Okay. Awesome. Thanks. Again, Darcy.

Thank you.

Okay. Next up, we have Lee Musgrave.

All right. I'm going to go back considerably further than our 1st 2 guests. I'm going to take you all the way back to.

Lee Musgrave

Alright. I'm gonna take you back to May 1962, or maybe I should start where you are right now, when you're sitting right where you are, I'm assuming most of you are in your studio. And you're facing a keyboard and a monitor screen. None of which existed in May, 1962. Absolutely none of it. This was my studio in Santa Monica. You think about. What do you know about Santa Monica. Beautiful place! My studio was. 6 very short blocks on the beach. Could come out that door and just walk right down Colorado Boulevard, and you would be at the Santa Monica Pier. Most artists in La had studios who looked just like that.

Lee Musgrave

The only exception might have been Sam Francis. He had one that was like 5 or 6 times bigger than that. But the rest of us had old sheds like this. Okay. 1962. I needed money. I needed a job other than the one I had. One I had was setting pins in a bowling alley that was back when pins didn't have machines. I had a little narrow one foot space to stand in between 2 alleys, balls flying down, both of them pins flying in all directions, and I was getting paid practically nothing.

Lee Musgrave

I was an art major. I asked people anybody anything related to art, any kind of business anywhere? And San Fernando Valley somebody mentioned to me that there were, say. Publication company that had an art department. I went right over there, went right in. There was a reception desk. Guy, very polite woman, and was sitting there, and I told her I was interested in speaking to the director of the Art Department. She said. Just a minute. She made a little phone call. She came back, she said, Follow me. We went back into the building.

Lee Musgrave

Into the office of the director of the Art department to serve. Very nice woman. She asked me to just stand at her desk for a minute. She had to go do something. She walked away. I looked at her desk, and I saw a large drawing on a desk piece of paper. I studied it, and I concluded it was a layout for a full page newspaper ad for a grocery store. And it had little markings. Next to all of the words, you know, like ham potatoes. Next to it, it had some mark, some numbers and letters in either red or blue.

Lee Musgrave

And I concluded that had something to do with the size of the type that was going to be set to make this ad. She came back and she saw me staring at it. She said, Do you understand this? And I said, Yeah, this is supposed to be in 48 point, but only bowl, she said, that's right, she said. You're looking for a job. Huh? So yeah, she's you're hired now. This was mission publications. They published local newspapers. Advertising brochures, a big variety of things. This place was a gold mine for a guy like me.

Lee Musgrave

I just couldn't believe it. She said. Come on in here. She went through another room, and in that there were a whole bunch of men in there running these machines that were gigantic. They were sort of the modern aversion of where printing started. They had these machines that had hot molding lead that would mold letters out, and they would type out whatever the writers from these different newspapers gave them, they would be copying it, and this big machine would be gathering all these metal letters together to make these things. I'm not going to go into all that. The point here is.

Lee Musgrave

She told me all of those machines were being ripped out and thrown away because nobody even wanted to buy them. All the men working in there had been offered to be trained on the new systems. They all laughed and said, you'll be out of business in a week. They all quit. Okay. And ladies, you're gonna love this part in the art department. There were all women working in the art because they didn't know about how to do those other machines. So only men ran those machines The new stuff. The men weren't interested in learning.

Lee Musgrave

The only 2 men working in the art department were myself and another art student who got there before me. His name was Roger Wirson. Okay, so she says, now come over here, and I sit at this table, and there's this ugly looking, boxy looking thing about oh, 2 feet wide, 2 feet high, 2 feet deep, sort of a hexagonal wedgie thing that all had all sorts of knobs and dials on it and buttons. Okay? And she said, This is a Vera typer headliner. Okay, she said. It sets.

Lee Musgrave

Hi. I said, it does just like the machine in the room next door, she said, yes, this huge machines had been reduced down to this little tabletop, ugly looking thing. They it sets big type. Not small type, anything less than 12 or 14 points. It couldn't do, but it was bigger than it could do. Inside of it was a small dark room inside the box. It had one tray for developer, one tray for fixative and one tray for water rinse. And it had a cartridge of positive 30 mile, 35 film what you put into it. So again, I'm not gonna take up all my time with all the take details. But just believe me when I say this thing was a marvel.

Lee Musgrave

It was revolutionary to my mind. I had never seen anything like it before. I very quickly. Learned how to manipulate that sucker, especially at the end of the day, when people were gone, I really played around with it to make all sorts of stuff problem was that everything that you made was made for temporary use to be The term they used was pasted down, but it wasn't pasted down. You ran this film that came out of this box through a waxer, and they put a layer of wax on the back, and you just stuck it down temporarily to go to the darkroom guys, and they photographed and they put it on. Hoffset presses.

Lee Musgrave

All right. So I am playing with it to make artwork, because when you got near the end of whatever the commercial job was that you were working on, there was a little room left on 35 now, so I got to play with that little piece. But it was not stable. It wasn't archival. It wouldn't last long. We left it out in sunlight it would turn yellow and brown and disappear. And so I only have one surviving piece from that era. I made it in the following year in 1964. It's somewhere here in my studio, but I haven't been able to locate it. I know I still have it.

Lee Musgrave

I did. In that case, was, I managed to figure out a way to put a negative inside that machine and manipulate it. So in terms of material examples that I can show you from 1962. No, I don't, except the one piece that's in there somewhere. And it doesn't really matter, because most of what you could do with that being was, make lines, make dots do X's and O's. You could do all that kind of stuff. The next machine that bought was about half the size of my studio. Here, gigantic it had to be in its own room with an air conditioner, because I had a tendency to overheat.

Lee Musgrave

Okay, it instead of small. 35 positive film. It worked on sheets of photographic paper. I have one. This is one of those originals, but it, too. Is not archive. It starts to yellow and turn all sorts of funnies colors, and it lasts unless you really hide it away. This one I found in the studio here. I am not sure why I kept it, but I'm glad I did, because it's about the only example. Alright. So let's move on. This is jumping now from this 1960s up to the 19 late 18 9 eighties, early 1900s. I finally convinced, along Los Angeles County Century Gallery.

Lee Musgrave

Which was a regional gallery in the San Fernando Valley, owned by the county to do an exhibit that included computer art. I didn't call it computer art. I couldn't make a reference like that. I called the exhibit disposition. I'm going to draw your attention to the 2 names in the middle, Judas Fetter and Tony Langston. These 2 people. We're doing the same kind of stuff I was doing. But the 2 of them were far more outspoken than I was. By this time. I had left mission publications, you know, and I became a college professor and I tried to get computer graphics in the art department. I had it for one semester only the company that loaned us 10 computers got pissed off because they thought the computers were going to the Science Department, not the art department.

Lee Musgrave

So they were taken away from me, and I never was able to get them back. And I can't. I can't play up for you The tension that existed between academic departments or between artists and art galleries. When you brought up the term computer art. You would. It was, almost, you know, like the current political debate going on in this country today. Only I was talking about artwork, anyway. Nudice Fetter, I would put as the number one outspoken person.

Lee Musgrave

She had attended the new Bauhaus School of Design in Chicago, and studied with Mahali Nagy. And then she came to Los Angeles and attended California State University in Northridge, which I graduated with my BA. And she stayed there and became an instructor in the computer department that they had there. So let's go on and take a look.

Sorry to interrupt. You got about. You got about 2 min.

I'm gonna jam at 10. Okay, this is the Los Angeles Time review of that show that put together for this is who Eunice. And this is Tony Lungston. That whoops that. Well, what happened there? Let's go back. Well, I'm sorry. That's you. See what she has holding in her hands. There. That's the computer she was looking for little square box. So that thing that I started with at mission publications in 1962 had been reduced down to that. And she 1st did more patterns. This is some of her work.

Lee Musgrave

Warren, in the 1970s and 80s, was still popular because of OP. Art. But it was easy to do on a computer. Tony did the exact same thing, but Tony did his on Plexiglass, and he did that because he was trying to get into the California light and space movement, and I worked in plexiglass as well. Tony died at the age of 73, Eudas better, by the way, lived until 2019. She was 100 years old when she died. This is me with Fritz Frice, my favorite professor from Csun.

Lee Musgrave

Fritz didn't do computer art, but he was keenly interested. He had studied at the Bauhaus with Kandinsky and Paul Clay. And he was very forward, thinking I really loved him. He listened to everything that I had to say about computers. And here's what I turned down. This was where I started applying my computer skills to the artwork. This is a 4 foot high, 8 foot long, sheet of quarter inch plexiglass all the negative spaces you see there. The lines were created on the computer.

Lee Musgrave

I heated this sucker up and bend it into an L shape so it would stand up. All the color you see on. It was put on there with cheap spray paint from cans. I got great response for this. But I couldn't tell that to the to the gallery director, or to the collectors who bought these pieces. I couldn't tell them that the designs images were created on a computer. They would have just chewed me up. You know it wasn't. Here's another one. Lot of stuff was still shot in black and white in those days.

Lee Musgrave

Here's a close up one. You see the section here at the where the curve is that isn't actually there. I laid it on a carpet to photograph. I always left clear areas in each one of the flexi pieces. And I was really disappointed when I got reviewed every show got reviewed by the La Times. Not a single critic addressed the fact that I had left clear spaces in and not a single credit. A critic asked me how I came up with these designs actually taken from a pamphlet I got on nuclear fission.

Lee Musgrave

I fed that into the computer.

Lee Musgrave

There's another one. Okay, so this is where I had been painting from 1969, la County has a yearly art competition. I enters it. In 1969, I an award. I was astounded. My 1st solo exhibit in a gallery was of these paintings. A lot of them sold this one I kept. It's damaged from earthquake. Lived through a lot of earthquakes. This is closer to taking The images I was making on the computer and applying it to paint. I did a whole lot of this kind of work.

Lee Musgrave

Now, at this point I'm still curating. I'm still Jane. There was an event that still goes on in La called Uk la United Kingdom, Los Angeles, and I was asked to curate exhibits and for the one in the early 1990s. I wanted to include Graham Nash's work. Graham Nash is from the rock group. Crosby, Nash and somebody he knew each other, and he called me up, and he said that he got one of the new printers, big printers. He knew he was interested in computer art, and he called me over to see the prints he had made.

Lee Musgrave

And he had violated the warranty on this thing, he had completely taken it apart and reassembled it because he thought he could improve it. He actually got a couple of patent patents on the black that he created because he made it archived. Anyway, when he ran off these new prints, big prints, they got glitches in them. I loved it jeez, this looks so wonderful, and I wanted to put it in the Ukla exhibit, he said, no. I'm telling you this story because he had experienced the same thing I had experienced for 20-30 years, couldn't walk into a gallery and say, I've got this stuff that I did on a computer, they would throw you out.

Lee Musgrave

They didn't want to hear about it. That wasn't hard work. That was junk. They weren't kidding, you know. And he. He was scared that if I put that in a major event like Uk la, he'd be laughed at so he wouldn't let me show he wanted to just show his traditional photography.

Hey, Lee, we need to move on. Sorry time constraints.

That's alright. I'll stop right there.

All right. Thank you.

Michael Pierre Price

Thanks, Lee.

Thank you for your time.

All right. Next up is Nina Sobell. Hey, Nina!

Hi, everybody! Hi!

Nina Sobell

Yeah. Okay, all right. I presentation more from a personal point of view. From the moment that I well, I'll go on. From the moment I thought of using anything technological with my work, which was a motor. And this was in Rome, Italy. I was a student at Tyler School of Art in Rome, and there was a double barrel vaulted ceiling, and I installed a movable well, what was going to be a movable ceiling, a ceiling, sculpture of foam. And.

Nina Sobell

Anyway, I thought of moving the ceiling up and down and then when I got back to Rome, I mean, and I got back to Philadelphia, I started again, making foam environments and a foam which you could change the appendages and the movement, the position of the appendages, and I thought of using an hydraulic. Remote, controlled way of doing it, and joined the experiments in art and technology in Philadelphia. And began collaborating with an engineer from U of P. There and then Cornell began.

Nina Sobell

And I started and then. Cornell began, and I made the actual. Movable ceiling with a remote control Squeegee with 2 buttons, one for variable speed and one for reverse with a 30 foot cord attached, so you could take the squeegee and go into another room with it. And that's looking up at the phone and from the from looking in from the hallway where it was installed At the A. D white museum, and it caused pandemonium. People came from all over and experimented with it. And. And it began this whole thing of using video because video was just 1st introduced. It was, I had experimented before this with as 6 in 69. This was taken in 71. By the time I finished doing my presentations I made the rockable movable ceiling and the cones balloons, and documented their interaction, and then reconstructed that interaction on 4 monitors with a physical symbol in the center Representing the what was on the screens, the rockable, removable ceiling, the Cones balloons. It was called the deconstruction of objects within a sequential time period.

Nina Sobell

And when you walk from that reconstructed time period to a 5 second time lapse, it picked up your movement like, if you had a habit of touching your nose. That would have been recorded by the time you meet you reach that 5 second time. Delay you would have already been touching your nose, so it brought you back into the gallery space and then passed a closed circuit monitor which represented the end of the show the in time. So I definitely began thinking of time and experience and thought and. It got me thinking when I went out to California and played with a neurofeedback machine, an alpha wave machine.

Nina Sobell

With my friend Mike Trivich. We decided because I had the video equipment, and he had an oscilloscope which Superimpose we super. I had the video to superimpose the output of The oscilloscope on the people's faces at the same time, and to teach the people, the participants, how to use the reel, to reel machine, to play back what they had made together. That was very important to me. And to show them how the ink trace was coming out was very important, and when one person was more distracted than the other, it distorted horizontally or vertically Informing the person who was on the X-axis or the y-axis, who was more distracted.

Nina Sobell

And when they were putting it back, when we were we were putting it into a circle, making a circle circular configuration and so that got me into computers. And then well, before that, I went to the Eeg, made the Eeg Video telemetry environment in Houston, Texas. And there you can see the Eeg was much reduced. And from NASA an oscilloscope. And then there was a colorizer and the colorizer was not actually identifying the colors, but colorizing it up. And even though I told the people it had no influence, they were determined to think that otherwise, and there I am attaching the electrodes in the upper quadrant and. That was walled off from the all. The equipment was walled off from a private area, a private section which is like a living room environment where people had a remote control between them, and they could stop and rewind and play back what they had made together.

Nina Sobell

In this area was one of the very 1st projectors. Very 1st video projectors. In 1975, I projected for 2 monitors to either side of the projector as soon as I had the 1st Recordings. And then the second, and the 3rd and the 4.th They went to either side of the real time projector of what people were making behind the wall. If you follow me, and then and then I began using in 1977, in London. I put a video, a video, the video that was facing out to the window, out. The window to the street was the same size, but there was so much glare I had to make it smaller.

Nina Sobell

And this was walled off again from the rest of the viewers who came into the gallery, and they went to the back of the gallery, and there was a monitor on the plinth. That's Genesis Prage. I don't know anybody who knows him but that was screened off. He could decide whether he wanted to go back out to the ledge and pick up the telephone and talk to me. And it was just a The communication matrix. It was an invitation. I had meter maids come by. I had people walking. Their kids come by, and it was just a completely open environment that was open to the public, encouraged passersby and Joseph boys in 1977, documentary 6 invited me to come and talk about it, because it was his 1st experience with somebody opening up a gallery space and onto the sidewalk, and inviting people in and to demystify the whole gallery experience and then, in 79 in California, in Ocean park. I set up the technology, the video camera and on a person inside the gallery and a camera with a person outside the gallery parallel, interviewing each other.

Nina Sobell

Interviewing each other for 15 min about each other's work. And even though again I said that the video wasn't going anywhere, it's closed circuit. In fact, I don't have any recordings of it. Only photographic documentation. It formalized. It formalized the whole presentation. It became props for a formal interview of each other, speaking about each other's work. And I was fascinated by that behavioral aspect. And then in 79, I worked at the 1st computer store in the world. It was opened by Dick Heiser, of the Rand think Tank, also Lee, on Colorado Boulevard.

Nina Sobell

Yeah, on Colorado Boulevard, was the 1st computer store, and it opened in 1978, I believe. And I was there working there in 1979. And I met Lee. I met Chris Matthews, and we worked on Computer graphics in his studio and superimposed the graphics the same way with the same special effects generator that I used in 74. At this Pulver veterans, administration laboratory and the idea of the ones at the bottom were as the 2 People were putting out rainwaves. They put them out in terms of a lightning bolt, and the closer that they got. Then there was a match.

Nina Sobell

A match of the output in the lower right hand corner and the upper left. In the middle and right were collections as they as they merged, as the diamond shapes merged into one as the as the cube, as the rectangles merged into one square as. And then the one on the right. It was the condensation. It was the collection of pixels. And became one

Nina! Oh.

Oh, yeah.

I got about 2 min to wrap up.

Okay, then I'll wrap it up with this. It was a moving camera piece that I just played for the 1st time recently, I think Adrian saw it for the 1st time. This is an installation piece, moving cameras, converging views which is installed in the window of the Franklin Furnace Gallery. It is here, as part of a performance. A festival of Los Angeles and London performance artists meeting in New York and working together and independently. It was funded by the National Debt. Well, I'll move it, move it along.

Nina Sobell

The piece was designed with me by John Gord. With the assistance of Paul Newell. Okay, I'll speak really quickly. These were 6 cameras, and you could. John Gord made it so that you could adjust the cameras and the speed of the each camera. And I had them going out and coming in for the people walking towards each other on the street and out, and coming in for the people across the street. And at the top there was there were 2 cameras, one going up to the World Trade sound towers, and one coming down from the World Trade towers. At that time they were still there, and bending the spherical space and bringing what was across the street to the same side of the space, and inside. I had The monitor, which represented all moving from 2 directions on the sidewalk. Their images would it was all of them together inside, inside. So I'm always working with interior and exterior space and merging and merging.

Nina Sobell

And at that time video was. And I wanted to do it with. Video. Yeah. Is, am I up now? My time's up right? Right.

Sorry. Sorry for the time limitations.

Yep.

I'm up, yeah.

You're welcome.

Work. So innovative. Yeah, brilliant.

Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. All right. Next up we have Adrianne Wortzel.

Hi,. Yeah. So thank you for this opportunity to talk about some work I did between 1969 and 1974 of which, unfortunately, I have very little documentation, because the idea of posterity had never entered my mind at that age so, but I was Solely an abstract painter. I was religious about being an abstract painter, probably because I was trained 1st at the Brooklyn Museum Art School with painters, Isaac Sawyer, Reuben Tam, and Tom Doyle, the sculptor, and then at Brooklyn College, which I fell into. My teachers were at Reinhart, Jim Ernst, Burgoyne, Diller, and Louise bourgeois.

Adrienne Wortzel

And so I had this incredible education, and I loved abstract painting. With the life itself comes 1969, and I become suddenly fascinated with what happens in the span, from something going from 2 to 3 dimensions, and I can show you what I mean. Can you see you can see me right, because I can't see me. Oh, yeah, I see me. Okay, so this is something really flat. And this is very simple. And you can open it so that it's not flat. And you can have stuff going on each side.

Adrienne Wortzel

And that my interest was in expanding this. This will do this to infinity. I could have this cover the earth. Well, not really. But you know, it could go on and on, and on and on. And I made these modules for every basic geometric shape that did that. Cubes. 4 sided triangles, 3 sided triangles, etc, etc. Why this happens so suddenly was because around that time I was made aware that I had absolutely No. 3D. Vision. I knew that all my life I kept any instruments flat, not facing up because I'd poke my eye out, and but I didn't know why, and I knew I had accidents. If I was at a table and offered to pour the wine or water, I would inevitably end up soaking the caviar, even if I was positive I was over the glass. And then finally.

Adrienne Wortzel

I had a boyfriend who was a wildlife photographer, and we were in Okefenokee Swamp, and there were a number of disasters, because, he said, turn the boat about 40 feet from shore. There was no way. I knew what 40 feet was, so I thought I did. On the other hand, I could play pool very well, because I can conceptualize things about where the balls would go. I also could see through a camera with one eye and where I was going with the other, so there were some advantages.

Adrienne Wortzel

However. And let's see. Oh, yeah, the only way I can tell depth perception is how large something is its scale in the picture plane. And it's comparison to other objects in the picture plane, and you can imagine driving. There was no way I could leave less than a car space between me and the next car. I had no idea where that car was in front of me, and they don't test you for this. It's called a lack of stereopsis, and I did have it diagnosed, and I did go twice in my life for training.

Adrienne Wortzel

But I ended up when I was 2528, and 75, and I ended up with double vision. So I'm kind of stuck with it, except for the few occasions I have seen it, and I ducked under a chair. Because to me this object coming towards me was going to attack me. I mean, it was so dramatic, and I was so aware of what I miss in life and in art by not having the capacity to experience 3D. Vision. So my brain was too far gone. By the time I was in my twenties to really, even with surgery, to make a difference. So I'm sure most of you are familiar with Flatland.

Adrienne Wortzel

Which was, let's see, I want to get to the right, Powerpoint. I have 2 of them. Okay, these were, this is the only living the only actual documentation I have of these modules. You can see there's a wire coming out on the side. Do you see him?

No, you're not sharing your screen.

Oh, sorry.

Adrienne Wortzel

That's what Covid will do. I have Covid. I'm in pretty good shape for that. Okay, here we go. Sorry.

Adrienne Wortzel

Okay, how about now? Yes.

Yes.

Okay, thank you. So, these were at Ok. Harris. And that's where I used to show these modules that this had has a wire extending from it, and it would just these simple motors that would move up and down, and so, very usually very subtly, not as drastic as this you would see these very, very stiff, rigid modules breathe. And for me this was like, you know, going from 2 to 3D. And then, having 3D activated mechanically, was for me like a religious experience. You know, it was like A growth both Blossoming and also cancerous. And also it was a metamorphosis. It was so out of extraordinary to me to experience that wait. Sorry didn't mean to do that. Yeah. So. This was a 1974 book on Kinetic Sculpture that contained images of several stage, you know, 3 stages of one particular piece, and this was Flatland, which I'm sure most of you are familiar with. It's the 1st edition which did not have Edward Abbott's name on it. It was done by a square, and I'm sure everybody knows it's a novella that made fun of Victorian mores by picturing a land of wait. I have a. Of two-dimensional figure people. The population consisted of two-dimensional figures. Men had many sides, and the more sides they had as polygons, the more powerful they were. Women were pictured as straight lines, so that if they turned towards you they were very dangerous. There's a high danger of impalement. And so they constructed their houses so that there wouldn't be any accidents when the woman turned and could hardly be seen how this segued into robotics. Well. I was always interested in avatars, and actually early on I did theatrical work in Moos, which were text-based worlds. They were object-oriented multi-user dungeons, and in them we all created worlds. It was just marvelous because it was all text-based, and so very easy to create worlds where you could do anything because it was text-based, and in that I did one in Finland. That was the story of the Kalavala, and everybody participates and comes in, and by the end it's pretty destroyed. But it was really interesting, because there were no boundaries. As to characters, nobody actually kept playing the characters they were assigned, and everybody went wild, and the story would multiply and change and have branches. So basically, I loved the idea of avatars. You could be anything or anyone you wanted. But I wanted to make the avatars real. So this is a, you know a concept where I'm making them real. But I'm also making them artificial because I'm making them robots.

Adrienne Wortzel

The avatars become agents, and they have store. Every installation I've ever done has stories behind it. The robots are characters. And this one was no different. This was the hidden archivists in the anchorage for creative time. And this was 19. 97. I think I can see on the slide that I have my old address, my old phone number and my old email address. But this was several robots that played archivists inside the anchorage of the Brooklyn Bridge on the Brooklyn side, and the space was fantastic.

Adrienne Wortzel

It was cavernous, and there were. There were several artists in that show, and they have it documented on creative time because they did it a number of years. What would happen is everything the robots saw would be reflected on the monitors that were here. And these were robotics, not really robotic. I called them robotic slide projectors, which, projected with, you know, constantly refocusing, projected slides all over this cavernous, cavernous space, so that when they were close and right up to the wall. They were in focus, and when they were 60 feet huge, you know, they were in focus. And so it became this kind of a documentation as if they were librarians, and they were really recording the history of cartography in the world. That's just another view.

Adrienne Wortzel

I just love this location. It's my favorite location, and I walked in immediately, had an asthma attack because it was total mold, but it was really quite fabulous, and to work in, and you can see on the floor there's oops. There's a projection with a robot on it. So all of these things kind of intermixed. And this is individual photos of the robots, which were real clunkers, you know. They were puppets and.

Adrienne Wortzel

Having personalities as puppets and clunkers was of great interest to me. Because that's how a lot of humans feel who are introverts when they're socializing. Now, I'm making a collection. By the way, of all the robots I ever worked with called tender portraits, and I have their portraits framed in a wall on a wall, as if you know their family members. And it's a very it's called tender portraits is some more. And this okay? So then it segued into using every single thing I could to express emotion through robotic entities, including, let's see if this will play Whoops, including using wind up toys to say things and this. These wind up toys are on a painting of mine and one of the abstract paintings, and it's called Giraffic Park.

Adrienne Wortzel

Okay, I'm going to segue into another Powerpoint. But just tell me, when, how much time do I have.

If you can wrap it up in the next minute or 2, that would be great.

Okay. Just about.

Adrienne Wortzel

Just about Techspressionism. This was a whole piece done called the Battle of the Pyramids about Napoleon's Conquest of Egypt, and I use Elmo's as French soldiers. Excuse me, these were stripped Elmos, that have the shape of a toddler, and at the time they were slightly robotic, they would do different. They could do different gestures, and so forth, and so on. And when Napoleon invaded Egypt, he had, he never told his army where they were going. They arrived in their winter woolen uniforms, and they were oops sorry, and they were untrained.

Adrienne Wortzel

For fighting. I guess they went all the way to the end. For fighting in Egypt. I developed these habits that for each piece I did there would be 2 scripts. One was the code script. One would be the script if there was dialogue and people, which often was the case. And then there would be the code any code. And this is a practice I used to tell my students about, because if you've ever seen a major museums requirements for purchasing a piece of yours that's technical. You might change your mind about wanting to sell it, because they really have demands about knowing every single thing about how it works.

Adrienne Wortzel

And sometimes in the beginning, especially in the nineties, we had no idea how it was working. So I think I'll wrap it up here. I could go through, you know, various pieces in time that used completely disparate robots, and always in character, always with a script. And I feel like that, you know, encasing those emotions in robotics in robots was Without anthropomorphosizing them because the work was too ironic to be serious. Was, you know what I was trying to do. Thank you.

Adrienne Wortzel

I'll stop sharing, sharing.

Thank you, Adrian, very much. Really, really fascinating work.

Here we go. Okay. I stopped.

Thanks again. I wanna thank all the presenters today. Roz will present next time in February. But I but before before we end the recording, and I'm sorry we're not going to get a chance to have some exchange or questions on the recording. But those who want to stay after for the after party. I just think that it is obvious the depth and breadth of The artists in this community. With regards to how technology has been used, how it is being used today. And like, I said, I think all of the new technologies that we all hear about these days, whether it's nfts or AI they're just echoes of what's gone before, and I'm really grateful for each of the presenters. Given the time constraints to share just a little bit of the flavor of what they experienced, what they did and how technology and art and the brilliance of artists can create wonderful, innovative.

Michael Pierre Price

Beautifully thought, provoking works of art. And so my thanks to each of you and I am going to end today's recording, thank you.