Stan VanDerBeek: Mosaics of the Mind
"We're just fooling around on the outer edges of our own sensibilities. The new technologies will open higher levels of psychic communication and neurological referencing."
For the last five years Stan VanDerBeek has been working simultaneously with live-action and animated films, single and multiple-projection formats, intermedia events, video experiments, and computer graphics. Clearly a Renaissance Man, VanDerBeek has been a vital force in the convergence of art and technology, displaying a visionary's insight into the cultural and psychological implications of the Paleocybernetic Age.
VanDerBeek has produced approximately ten computer films in collaboration with Kenneth Knowlton of Bell Telephone Laboratories in New Jersey. They are descriptively titled Poem Fields, One through Eight, plus Collisdeoscope and a tenth film unfinished as of this writing. The term Poem Field indicates the visual effect of the mosaic picture system called Beflix (derived from "Bell Flicks") written by Knowlton. A high-level set of macro-instructions was first written in Fortran. The particular translation or definition of this language for each film is then determined by the subroutine system of mosaic composition called Beflix. A new set of Beflix punch cards is fed into the Fortran-primed computer (an IBM 7094 interfaced with an SC-4020 microfilm plotter) for each new movie desired.
Computer interpretation of the word "movies," from a film by Stan VanDerBeek and Kenneth C. Knowlton.
Whereas most other digital computer films are characterized by linear trajectile figures moving dynamically in simulated three-dimensional space, the VanDerBeek-Knowlton Poem Fields are complex, syncretistic two-dimensional tapestries of geometrical configurations in mosaic patterns. "The mind is a computer," says VanDerBeek, "not railroad tracks. Human intelligence functions on the order of a hundred-thousand decisions per second." It appears this brain capacity was a prime motive in the production of the Poem Fields, whose micro-patterns seem to permutate in a constant process of metamorphosis which could very likely include a hundred-thousand minuscule changes each second.
"The present state of design of graphics display systems," VanDerBeek explains, "is to integrate small points of light turned on or off at high speeds. A picture is 'resolved' from the mosaic points of light." The artist seems to feel that this process bears some physiognomic similarities to human perception. "The eye," he notes, "is a mosaic of rods and cones."
Variations of the Beflix technique of mosaic image-making, from computer films by Stan VanDerBeek and Kenneth C. Knowlton.
The early Poem Fields were investigations of calligraphic relationships between dogs and alphabetic characters integrated into fields of geometrical patterns constantly evolving into new forms. The most famous of these is Man and His World (1967), a title piece for an exhibit at Expo '67.
Variations on the mosaic field became more complex with successive experiments, until simulated three-dimensional depth was achieved in the form of infinitely-repeated modular units in perspective. It is immediately obvious that these films would be prohibitively tedious and time-consuming to do through conventional animation techniques. "Because of their high speeds of calculation and display," writes Knowlton, "the computer and automatic film recorder make feasible the production of some kinds of films that previously would have been far too expensive or difficult. In addition, the speed, ease, and economy of computer animation permit the moviemaker to take several tries at a scene— producing a whole family of film clips— from which he chooses the most appealing result, a luxury never before possible."27
The more recent Beflix films have abandoned the original calligraphic patterns for highly complex Rorschach constellations of stunning beauty. They actually began with a film produced by two other scientists at Bell Telephone, B. Julesz and C. Bosche, for use in experiments with human vision and perception. This involved semirandom generation of graphic "noise," whose patterns were reflected several times to produce intricate mandala grids resembling Persian carpets and snowflake crystals.
"We're now working with variations on the Beflix system that involves secondary systems," VanDerBeek explained. "It goes through two levels: first Beflix, then computerizing and quantizing that level. It's something similar to what Ken Knowlton and Leon Harmon did with pictures-within-pictures. We're trying to do that cinematically."
The Poem Fields are filmed in black-and-white, with color added later through a special optical process that permits color gradations and increments almost as complex as the forms themselves.
Peter Kamnitzer: Pre-Experiencing Alternative Futures
"We would like to put the researcher, designer, decision-maker or the public at large in an environment where they could be exposed to what various futures may look like. We will do this with computer simulation, which I believe will trigger the next creative leap in the human brain."
So far we have restricted our discussion to the computers and computer output subsystems most likely to be accessible to the filmmaker with luck. Furthermore we have been concerned primarily with purely aesthetic applications of these techniques, or what I like to call "computer art for the computer's sake." The limitations of these systems should be obvious by now.
We have seen that in order to obtain computerized representational imagery it is necessary in most cases to begin with some sort of representational input (physical scale models or photographs, etc.), which are then scanned or translated by the computer through optical-pickup devices, servo-driven television cameras or film-storage systems. In fact the most spectacular films discussed so far— Lapis, Cybernetik 5.3, Permutations, and the Whitney triple-screen film— were heavily augmented through conventional film-processing techniques.
Furthermore, the impact of these films is wholly visual or experiential, with conceptual appreciation of the computer's role reduced to a minimum. If we can say that a conventional film is "cinematic" only to the extent that it does not rely on elements of literature or theatre, we must therefore say that a computer film is not fully "computerized" until it is relatively free from conventional film-making techniques.
With this in mind we might better appreciate Peter Kamnitzer's City-Scape, a film in which no representational imagery existed before it was produced by the computer. The computer drew the city strictly from coded mathematical input in the same way that the Whitneys' geometrical forms are generated from polar equations. The software and hardware requirements to achieve this, however, are extremely sophisticated and expensive. Viewed merely as an animated film, City-Scape leaves much to be desired. Compared to Yellow Submarine, for example, it is like the earliest tintype compared to laser holography— on a purely visual level, that is. But City-Scape is deceptive. First of all, it is not an animated film in the sense that most of the computer films we've been discussing are animated. The color CRT display, produced through electron-scanning similar to conventional television, was recorded on color movie film in real-time, on-line operation.