What’s On | Computer Baroque
Online Exhibition | Computer Baroque: defining works in the history of digital moving image – an online exhibition for Animate Projects curated by Richard Wright
Date & time | Available online until 14 July 2009
Computer Baroque is an exhibition of films by pioneers of computer animation: Karl Sims, Yoichiro Kawaguchi, William Latham, Beriou, John Tonkin, Chris Landreth, Peter Callas, Simon Biggs, Ruth Lingford, James Duesing, Paul Garrin, Shelley Lake, The Butler Brothers and Jason White & Richard Wright.
Rarely seen, they represent a period – the late 1980s and early 1990s – in which computer animation was the focus for the most audacious and exuberant experiments across all areas of new media, art and technology. The films range from earlier works by Karl Sims and William Latham influenced by scientific ideas to the more ironic and satirical works by Shelley Lake and the Butler Brothers.
Films are accompanied by programme notes and an essay by curator Richard Wright.
“Why characterise this period as ‘Baroque’? I think it was the sense that by the late 1980s we had reached a stage where the power of computers could finally be harnessed by more than a handful of insiders. Artists wanted to push the computer as far as it would go, to create visual transformations that defied previous traditions, to blend image and music and text, to apply scientific ideas as new sources of inspiration.
It created a strident kind of image that insisted on the fact of its own realisation, fleeting paeans to the artificial. Yet equally present was a nagging anxiety, that this artifice heralded a world of totalizing control, paranoia and catastrophe”. Richard Wright
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