08: Timeline Ch 6—Personal Computer Era (1980s) with Mark Wilson, Copper Giloth, Dan Sandin, David Em, William Latham, Stephen Todd, Darcy Gerbarg & Geoff Davis

[MUSIC] Hello everybody and welcome to this Larandam panel celebrating chapter six of our generative art timeline covering the decade of the 1980s. I'm your host Peter Bauman or Muk Antony. I'm the content person at Larandam. And my host today is Conrad House Nemocake from Larandam. Joining us today are some of the most prominent figures and digital art whose careers overlapped with the decade of the 1980s. We are incredibly fortunate and humbled so welcome. Darcy Gerbar, Copper Gillif, David M. Mark Wilson, Dan Santon, William Latham, Stephen Todd, and Jeff Davis. Today is again all about the decade of the 1980s and generative art, but we're taking kind of a more generous view today, more digital art and its predecessors. At Larandam, I've been writing a generative art timeline and Conrad has been invaluable helping with several tasks and including images. And this timeline goes back 70,000 years into pre-modern history, which chapter one, and we've had talks for each chapter. And this is our talk for chapter six, which we released earlier in the week. So this exercise isn't about looking back for old time's sake. It's about looking back to learn here from these absolute incredible pioneers and Latham's first hand and take their lessons with us today. I'm going to briefly introduce each of these incredible artists and then they will have a little time to say a few words about themselves. Let's start with Darcy. Darcy is a pioneer digital artist who organized and curated the first sci-graph computer art exhibits in the early 80s. She now creates work using both related digital technologies and traditional fine art techniques. Darcy, think you so much for joining us. Would you like to say anything more about yourself? I don't really think of myself as a generative artist and I never thought that the program was more important than what you saw as as the piece of art. And this has been a long time discussion in the computer graphics field. Of course, I use software that has been written by really brilliant and early pioneers. Some of it was custom. Some of it was not products that were available to buy. And today of course, particularly Photoshop really changed a lot of things. And that kind of happened in the mid 80s. I'd say when Adobe got that software and started Photoshop changed a lot of things. And also, more color became available in the mid 80s on a PC level computers until then you really only had eight bits of color. You only had maybe 16 colors. I had a unique experience maybe. I came out of the art world in New York. All the people I knew were color field painters, abstract expressionist painters. They were showing in leading galleries and having exhibits in major museums and things like that. And I really started, I wanted to find out what the leading technology was for my generation. And I knew about digital audio. I knew about electronic music and I thought there had to be something comparable for the visual arts. So I went to the art library in New York City and found some things in particular. I came across Ruth Levitt's book. Which was really interesting. And I tried to contact all each of the artists in that book. And I did contact quite a few of them. At that time, I really didn't know anything about digital art or the community or who was doing anything anywhere. But I got involved very quickly. But I still always thought of myself as a painter. I was fortunate the first computer tools I used to make art. The first tool I used was Avivacepsy's paint system. And it was 24 bits of color. It was full color. And I never wanted to go back to learning how to program eight bits of color. I wasn't interested in just having lines drawn. There were no good printers at those times. So I then spent and still spend a lot of my time in my practice figuring out how to take these digital images that I created on computer and get into a physical medium. I also, unlike Ian and Opera and quite a few of the artist's work, I did not feel that motion and animation moving images for the whole story. I was a painter. I thought of myself as a painter. I wanted pictures painting big ones. It was nice if possible. Yeah, that's something that we would love to get into a little bit further. That's a really interesting topic actually. Maybe we can move on, sorry, to Copper. Copper is a Copper Gillif is a pioneering digital artist and professor. In 1980, she was the first graduate of the MFA program at the Electronic Visualization Lab at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Much of her early work was among the pioneering efforts in the nascent field of computer art and graphics. She chaired to graph art show competitions in 1982 and 1983 that traveled all over the world. So Copper, you are really like what it might hear us because you've been such a documenter of this space and it's been invaluable for me. So really, truly, it's a pleasure to have you. Can you please tell us a bit more about yourself? I want to give sort of a context history. I think the first thing I'll say is that when I was a little girl, my father was working for Bell Labs and I can remember him taking me to see these introduction of the laser and saying, this is going to be important. And I think that and I saw Bob Mallory who is an important artist and I saw his work at the 1964 World's Fair. And then I just grew up and I got a degree in sculpture. But in 1978, I completed my first digital animation in 1979 using a ballet video game system configured with Tom DeFonte's Zegras programming language. I programmed the piece. I saved it on an audio cassette tape and outputted it to output the animation to video. This was, oh, there's a picture of it. Dan's ready for me. Within two years, these programs had evolved into an interactive symmetry drawing installation with the help of my friends and colleagues. And that was exhibited in the fall of 1980 at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. I sort of felt like, wow, I'm real. This fall, some of the work I made during this period and in the 90s will be documented again in the Lackma Digital Witness Exhibition. So that's where I am now. I'm amazing. Thank you, Copper. And we can move on to Mark. Now, Mark is an American artist, author and programmer who was part of the 1980s movement of artist programmers at the forefront of the use of computer software to create art. In the early 80s, Mark purchased a micro computer and began to learn programming after training as a traditional artist. Mark, he is also widely exhibited around the world, including in the permanent collection of the DNA and has been exhibited at prestigious shows like Cigraf as well. So again, welcome, Mark. Could you please introduce yourself a bit more and tell us a bit more about your journey? Thank you, Peter. And greetings to all of my fellow panelists. I was telling my son about this event and he said, "Legends of the 80s, it sounds like some kind of rock revival concert." And I assured him that it was not. Anyway, to give a brief summary of my career, I started as a fine artist, went to art school, didn't know anything about computers, computer graphics, mathematics, your typical artist pushing paint around on canvas. And as my work evolved, it became kind of technologically based. I made drawings and paintings that were somewhat reminiscent of architectural drawings, engineering drawings, electronic diagrams. So I was predisposed to an interest in computers. And I think that what are the most important aspects of the of the whole 80s in terms of its relevance to art making is that the explosion of the of the personal computers in, you know, the beginning with the TRS 80s, trash 80s and apples in the late 70s and then moving on to IBM PCs. And in this sort of context, I was fascinated with computers and I went out and bought one in 1980 and I got it home and I thought it was absolutely wonderful but I didn't have the famous idea of how I was going to use it to make art. And I knew there are a lot of paint programs out but they didn't really interest me very much and then I started playing around with the computer and I discovered that programming while somewhat intimidating was turned out to be a very natural way for a visual artist to construct images. So I began programming and initially it was very rudimentary stuff. And as we all know, computers are wonderful for crunching numbers but they there is no inherent way to make pictures with computers and that has always been a problem it exists today just as much as it did 40 years ago. But there were these machines, these simple machines called penplotters and they were the penplotters produced physical art objects that were very similar to some of the work that I had done earlier, very linear images. So I bought I bought a small penplotter and my work is really evolved from that point and the software, my software is still relatively simple software but it has evolved over the years and I found it capable of producing a nice variety of different styles and imagery. And the other thing I wanted to mention about the 80s is that I think I met some of you at Seiggraph I know I certainly know Copper and Darcy and Seiggraph was a wonderful institution, is a wonderful institution because it started out very early with the art shows and the art shows were really wonderful in terms of offering artists a chance to see other artists work and to exhibit their exhibit their own work and it served as an important forum I think for all of us as a way to increase our knowledge and stimulate our ideas about art making. Yeah I think that's a really good point is how important those early Seiggraph shows are and we're and that's why I mean it can't believe how fortunate we are to have both Copper and Darcy here today. Let's us continue with the introductions. The next person who again I cannot believe this here is David in also originally a painter. David is a dental art pioneer known for his early work with pixels and groundbreaking creations at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory or JPL. His innovative contributions have been internationally recognized and exhibited in museums worldwide. So David thank you so much for joining us. Can you briefly say hi and tell us a little more about yourself? Sure well hello to everybody and it's an honor to be here with all you guys. It is bringing back the idea. He's not quite bringing putting the band back together but it really has been a lot of history that a lot of us who shared and so a little about myself I started like some others here as a painter, art background and then when I was 22 in 1975 I wound up at a Xerox research park and saw pixels for the first time. Pixel was not part of my vocabulary. The word digital was not part of my vocabulary. I really didn't know that any of this world existed. I'd been working for about a year in a studio in San Francisco doing analog video synthesis. So the idea of artists and machines working together was very much something I was pursuing and give a shout out here to Dan, Dan, you're a very early inspiration to me as somebody who had really put those two things together and what Namjoon Pike was doing so this was all still in the analog world but it was yeah there's electronic information out there and we as artists in this generation this is the time to really jump on that. So I got it immediately and I saw this is the future of art. Why other people didn't see it at the time is beyond me to this day but it was clear to me and that started a long journey that yeah it took me to JBL to be a lot of other places but since we're talking about the 80s that was I think a very important transitional period of time for the entire medium for all of us as individuals and also in the larger really social cultural aspect of human consciousness because you know it's hard to think of it from the point of view that we're at today but just as I have never heard the word digital neither had anybody else you know outside of for a few hundred practitioners on the Empire planet this was unknown territory and so what happened in the 80s through a sigrath I mean you know what what Darcy and Copper did with those early shows was like so important in terms of exposing to the world that this stuff existed at all and so it was during that period really you know you could say for about I think 1981 which is I think Darcy wouldn't that first show that you did happen up until let's say 1990 a whole bunch of things happened one right after the other and a couple people mentioned personal computers like yeah right you know I started working with a mainframe at AAA I was working on a deck 10 in 1976 by 1990 I was working on a Mac 2FX in my own studio that is an incredible revolution to have happened in a 10-year span of time and so there was there was that the fact that we went from no such thing as a commercial software to where that was just something that you could go out you could buy a computer and you could buy software to put on it that was so radical I have like a thousand stories I won't get into them now but one I'm just remembering is and thinking of SIGRAPH SIGRAPH sponsored an event I don't remember when it was maybe 1983ish at Caltech and and it was a sponsored by National SIGRAPH a whole bunch of really great people came and afterwards some of us went out to dinner and we were walking up Lake Street in Pasadena it's about 11 o'clock at night I think I was maybe with Jim Blin Jim Kajia maybe Vibhaka Sorensen was there maybe Adam Schruel I just small group of us and we walked by an egghead software which none of us had seen before and we all just like stopped and looked at that store and said this is a store that sells nothing but software and we all just burst into hysterical after we could not believe that we were looking revolution to me of the 80s in a nutshell as we went from a place where it only existed in these institutions that you had to get access to and the whole thing to the point where you could like walk down Lake Street walk in a store and buy a paint program mind blowing so that's the transition as I see it and then you know onto today where you know these days I'm just like the last couple years deeply immersed in AI we're living on another planet now especially in terms of general to Vart which is which is I your your guys don't miss a lot well thank you so much for that wonderful context yeah like when you when you put it that way when you when you start at the beginning and and look at the end maybe we can do that a bit more later it is such a remarkable stretch of time and so happy you get to bring it to the before and celebrate it today. But the next person I'll introduce is William Latham. He is a pioneering figure in generative art who revolutionized the field with his mutator evolutionary art, which he developed at IBM in the late '80s. His work characterized by organic forms generated through innovative software garnered international acclaim and has been exhibited globally as well. Then he transitioned to RAVE music and game development and his Foundry Pushing creations continue to captivate audiences in those field and to today. So, William, thank you so much for joining us. Can you tell us a bit more about yourself? OK. So fantastic to be on the panel with everyone, I guess. With the '80s, my entry point in 1987, when age 25, I became an IBM research fellow for the next six years of their scientific centering, Winchester in the South of England. And there I started my collaboration with Stephen Todd, you're talking a minute. And I guess through IBM I got access to big IBM mainframe computers. And from an early age, I think it's five years, I've been very interested in evolutionary systems, rule-based art, and working with Stephen Todd, we implemented these evolutionary ideas in terms of software. So I guess I was kind of capitalizing on all the hard work done by Jim Blair and Perlin and all this. So I could just see the potential for taking photorealist techniques and processes and applying it to organic and strange forms. So these strange forms kind of lurk out of the darkness. And in particular, working with Stephen, I got access to a CSG renderer, which you could do, being in operations, which is very nice, the kind of sculptural effects. And then we were able to develop this form-growing language, which enabled us to evolve organic forms that were taking stealing geometry from nature and we'd re-implemented in form-growing. So I had the luxury of being able to craft my own software, and that's a philosophy that I've maintained ever since. The SIGGRAPH definitely was important. We showed the sequence in evolution of form at SIGGRAPH in Dallas. And it was just a fantastic event. And the art show I first showed in 1987 was brilliant. But yeah, so I'm quite late in the '80s. Capitalizing on everything that everyone's done, definitely great meeting, David Transjovian Pipeline 1979. It was one of the reasons why I got interested in computers as the colors. I love the colors, the textures. So I guess I've capitalized on all the hard work that's gone before and longer term collaboration with Steve when he's still going on. Later on, my slight challenge now is people like the old stuff, do they like the new stuff as much? You feel like you're competing a bit with yourself. So it'll be a lot of black and white work at the moment. It seems to be going down really well in China. Something a lot in China at the moment. And I've had a lot of fun in VR. So that's probably I've gone over time, but I'll pass you back. Well, yeah, thank you so much, William. And I think it's a really good point that we have so many different people here today and their careers overlap with the '80s and lots of different interesting ways. And I think let's move on to Stephen and then we'll get to Dan and Jeff. Stephen was a key collaborator. It still is a key collaborator with William. He co-developed the groundbreaking mutator evolutionary art system with William at IBM in the late '80s. And their innovative alternative evolutionary software system has been paved in the way for intricate 3D forms that are now ubiquitous. So Stephen, again, thank you so much for joining us. And can you please tell us a bit more about yourself? What a pleasure to have you. I came from mass and then computing background, sort of actually beginning in database as my main thing. And then in the early '70s, sorry, the early '80s, we're doing a lot of data visualization working with scientists and molecular graphics, which in fact, they're still doing, again, even with some of the people who we were originally working with back in the '80s. And that meant we'd put together both geometric programming and high quality of computer graphics based on C and S. G. But also, as William said, totally relying on lots of stuff that we've gone before for making it very realistic. And then our manager suggested that this was all quite fine. It would be-- he met William. When did you meet Peter Horan and William? In 1986. Yeah. And so Peter brought William to the lab. And we had the right programming environment, hardware environments, and so on. Still very limited. One of my favorite quick stories is we were limited to eight bits, not eight bits per channel, but eight bits total for the color. So we got quite good at reducing down, and really optimizing the erudite fusion and stuff. And our first exhibition, somebody was looking at the prints, looking at all of very fine-growing texture, and you get a result of that. And I'm really like, away, you've got this lovely texture in just sort of-- we don't have that anymore. We're doing it all in eight bits or more. How wonderful that you did in the rekindling backslap ration, Stephen. And we can move on to Dan. Now, Dan Sendin is a globally renowned pioneer of electronic art and visualization. He served as the director of the legendary EGL, the Electronic Visualization Lab, and professor at the University of Illinois, Chicago with Copper. From his groundbreaking work on scientific visualization to creations like the send-in image processor and visionary work on virtual reality theaters like the TAFE, his contributions have earned him a claim and support prestigious institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art. So wow, Dan, what an absolute honor and privilege to have you. Sir, thank you very much. Could you please tell us a bit more about yourself? Thank you very much for that introduction. I'm famous for not unmuting when I start talking in the circles of my video conferencing. So behind me is a computer. It's an analog computer that processes video images in real time. And that was really from the early '70s. In the '80s, we first of all, I'd like to say that I constantly work with Tom DeFonte in doing all of this stuff. And we ran an operation which generated hardware for artists to use and software for artists to use. And we're supportive and part of a very rich artist community in Chicago that did an amazing amount of work. So this is an early woody box. Sorry, the framing is not great. And that was the work that produced-- that was a device that could produce animation. It could hold 16 frames. But you could do these additive animations where you'd start with something and then keep adding it. This is a frame from Jane Vider work. And this was a case where this part went through a nice cycle of walking and then other stuff was added and changed. And on to videotape. But that was the beginning of the '80s. The machines look like this and the graphic qualities-- kind of look like that. The end of the '80s, when I was working in this area, this was using one of the-- this was a desk side supercomputer, which now would be thought of as a GPU and producing work of many more flexible graphic qualities. You have shadows, you have highlights, you have rich imagery. But I must say, when I look at this work by Jane Vider, I'm completely amazed by it every time I watch it. And it's a similar length work to this one, of course. I think this is a great piece of work, too. But both of them give me the same kind of wild factor and just like that's an amazing piece of work feeling from across all of those technological steps. Yeah, that's incredible. And I asked Jane to try this. Unfortunately, she wasn't able to. But what-- But what a demonstration again of the changes throughout the decades of Think You Dad. And we have our introduction. We're going to wrap these up with another unbelievable guest who's joining us today. And that is Jeff Davis. He's an artist and AI researcher at the University of the Arts London. He explores the ethical dimensions of computer generated art. He's got a diverse background in electronic arts, psychology, and counseling. Davis is also an innovator and educator. He founded Story Software and Micro Arts. And he is a friend of Larantham. He is helping to contribute to the timeline that we're celebrating and we're talking about today. And he is also just a great artist. We'd really like to extend a warm welcome to Jeff for joining us. So thank you, Jeff. Would you like to say a bit more about yourself? Yeah, sure. Hello everyone. It's great to be here this evening. It's actually after midnight, where I am, which is great. So basically, I had a background in my university degree was in psychology. But at the time, I had a band, a musical band, and we used to do mixed media shows. So I was quite used to working with quite old fashion, very heavy video decks, which I think were ematic at the time, and processing images and whatnot with music. So after university, I moved to London and got involved with the arts scene there, which was London Video Arts. And also mainly the London filmmakers co-op, which was quite a lively scene. And there was all art. There was no money involved. It was all structuralist film. There was people like Stan Brakage, who were very popular, and you'd watch some abstract film for an hour. And that would be entertainment. So it was very abstract, very hardcore image-based scene with sound. There's always been some soundtrack, so I did a bit of work there. Now, to pay my way in those days after university, I didn't go into psychology. I got a job as a commercial programmer. So I was programming on mainframes to start with a Univaki 1100, quite famous machine. I used to paint with a pencil, and then get edited by people. And we'd get the printouts back with the corrections on, and cycle through that. We didn't even see a monitor until several of these editing phases had gone through. And we hardly ever saw the computer, because of course it was in a different room. Eventually, I didn't. I really like that kind of work. I was coding co-ball, which is a business language for a big organization. You know, it's great, but not really me. So when a broad got published writing some fiction, so I was in the kind of RT mood. And then the micro computer came out in about '84. And this was just this incredible machine, a Sinclair Spectrum, which is literally as big as a paperback. And I was so used to working with really big machines that this thing was like this incredible toy that I could just code anything I wanted. And the whole machine was in that little box. You could plug it into a TV set, which was another big factor in accessibility. You only had to buy the computer, and then you didn't have to buy a monitor. So all these things were going on. I thought, well, I'm no better than video arts. I love London filmmakers' cuts. So I thought I'd set up a computer equivalent with micro arts. So that's how micro arts, that was the inspiration. And I knew a lot of people in doing similar things were working with video or film, you know, sound. So we put together this whole project. And I actually programmed most of it myself. So I did a lot of generative art, which I did because I was a programmer. So it was very natural for me to properly code with bits and bytes, some actual graphics. So I did a whole series of graphics pieces. I did a text generator. I don't know whether anybody's sort of back in this crowd. He's a curator, but he said that the text generator was an early version of chat GPT, which might be overstating it. It was 1985. So this was quite a while ago. A story generator program came out through micro arts. Eventually, it didn't really, we were posting data sets, somebody mentioned data sets, we're posting tapes to people and it was kind of community going on, but wasn't really making any money. So press style, which was teletext asked us to put all of our material on their early networking system. So we put the whole lot on to press style in the UK. And I think in Canada, America, there's another one, but Minita was the one that was in Europe. So this was a pre-internet sort of networking bulletin board system that came out through TV signals and you just have a modem and get it off your TV signal. So that was all kind of networking. Now in terms of very, very briefly, because I know I'm going on a bit, eighties for me was mainframes where you wrote in with a pencil and then this whole weird system doing big programs. And I watched on some minutes, Vax minutes I watched on for, then the micro computer. And by the end, by 1988, I was working in an art college in Sheffield, back to Sheffield. And they had Apollo work stations, which were sort of state of the art graphic machines, just like modern machines now, really. Just that, you know, the backups weren't as easy to do and stuff like that. But we were doing 3D animation, surface modeling, solid modeling. We had SDRC ideas, which is what they modeled the space shuttle on. And all this was 88. You know, that had all happened so quickly, eight years, nine years, you know. So the gear we had at Sheffield at the end of the decade was just revolutionary. And that was mainly the hardware changes that came in. That's what fueled the software changes. There was such a big expansion in hardware in that period. So I mean, I think you mentioned about it being like a medieval period where people were holding the flame, but I don't know. I think it actually did change. I think one quick point about AI, we're in a similar period now, I'd say. So many changes have to happen around now and almost. Thank you so much for the introductions from everybody and apologies if it ran a bit longer. But I think it's really nice that we get kind of these anecdotal references from each and every one of you. It's very rich in of itself. It's probably more important than any questions Peter and I could come up with. But I think we could probably start by maybe one broad question that we can kind of just ask the crowd if anybody wants to jump in, feel free to mute or unmute yourself to talk about it. There's been something that we've kind of referenced already, especially David and I'm talking about how like the early 80s, we had these very large mainframe computers where you weren't even in the same room as a computer necessarily. And then we get to the late 80s, 89, 88 where we have very personalized PCs that are pretty accessible in terms of hardware and software development. I want to maybe add on to this because something we talk about a lot in the 60s and 70s is this natural public stigma against kind of computer art, art and computers in general with this overbearing machine that in some ways felt very scary to a lot of people. Does anyone want to expand on how the stigmas of machines are this fear against machines that changed in the 80s? Sure. You know, this is a topic I've certainly thought about, experience from the first hand. I'll bet everybody here as well with from my own personal perspective. It was, I might have mentioned this when I was telling that to you guys, I just didn't believe that everyone didn't see it, you know, how obvious it was that this was going to change everything. Well, the word that you use, scary, people were scared in those days. It's very difficult today to understand the mindset of the international world culture coming out of the 60s and the 70s. You know, there was a whole thing about the bomb technology was going to come out and crush your consciousness, masher toes, IBM is evil, they're out to get you. And yet there was also this love affair with technology that was going on, you know, electric guitars, buddy, Holly, you know, the first steps on the moon, NASA, you know, so people were like jazz and they were freaked at the same time and didn't quite know where things were going to fall. And so when these images and also music came out at this time, it turned the consciousness of what was going on. I was like, hey, wow, the computers can actually be cool. It's a creative device. And so that was a huge mindset. And I think the general public was completely open to it. And so I got to experience that. You know, a lot of my images have been credited with helping people see that this was a door opening, not, you know, a horrible, medieval great. That was, it was going to, you know, mash and kill and do horrible things. So that was one really big aspect of it. The other thing was that other people may have comments about this was the art world, unlike the general public, just couldn't get it. You know, it wasn't until very recently, from my perspective, that finally the art world has jumped on the bandwagon and they're all excited and they're shows and bloody, dot, ed, but I'll just wrap up by saying one of the things that was really a problem was text tool. And that is that the term that was used in those days for this kind of work wasn't digital art or whatever we call it today. It was computer graphics and in the art world, that combination of those two words were like a nathema, you know, the word computer. You're out of the room. Even though they loved video art, video art was accepted. And that's a very interesting discussion too. But when you took computer and graphics, which were looked down on in the art world, it was like, forget about it. You're not playing at this party. So Rebecca Allen, I was talking to her a while ago, made the comment that it wasn't the art world didn't accept us at all. But it's like we were in an art ghetto. And that's pretty much the way it worked in the art world. from my point of the others may have experienced it differently. I just had a couple comments. So I mentioned in my introduction that I had this interactive installation at the Museum of Contemporary Art and this well-known critic, one of the most funny statements that he made in talking about the work. And he wasn't totally negative, but he did say that the use of the computer destroyed the contemplative aspects of art making. Now clearly this man hadn't waited for anything or had had no concept of how long it took you to make something. The other thing that happened is I was interviewed for evening news by Bob Sarat in 1980 and they ended up saying that they thought that maybe this work was going to take over the networks because it was interesting. So there were these two very different responses to the work of that time. And this was 1980. Yeah, I'm probably just jumping in with the response to that real quick. You're so right on with that copper because I'm remembering that the big discussion in those days, believe it or not, wasn't, you know, is it good art? It's but is it art? Is it art at all? And you know, how do you deal with that? As copper just said, I mean, you know, you do your blood, your sweat, your tears, your trenches, you do this work. You hope that we'll be received in some way. And they say, no, it's not even in the game. So that was what we were dealing with at that time on the conceptual level. Yeah, I just got a quick comment. I was working in an art college at the end of the 80s, where we had all this 12 big work stations and we had mainly design students using it who would make the classic teapot, you know, do all this smooth rendering and whatnot. And they were learning CAD, you know, commutated design basically. But we did have quite a few fine art students would just make their way into the rooms. It was open access and I used to run the lab. And they do all sorts of really unusual things, that they make mesh patterns and then, you know, somehow photograph them and then use them in their art. And it was a really creative period. And those students didn't really have any knowledge of the field, because there was no knowledge of the field at the time. Well, hardly any in England, anyway, the computer art society wasn't operating at all. And microt was a kind of tiny version of that, I suppose, putting out information, but that was a really short lift. So this is the final students would just come in an experiment. And they were very open-minded, I thought. So I think that it was the art world rather than the artists who weren't interested, you know? Well, I wanted to say that the art world just didn't know anything about it in the 80s. They weren't familiar with it. In my world, in New York, in the art world, we would go every all the time, exhibitions, the galleries, and at the museums, and so on. There was no anything about computer art. And what happened as people found out that I was using computers to make art, which started in '79, was that I'd walk into the room and people would like, move away from me as if I almost had some awful disease or something. And when you talk to them, they actually were afraid that the computers were going to replace them in some way. The artists were feeling this. Very few of the people I knew in that world were willing to even talk about or look at any art that was made with computers at all. I had the opportunity to work with Cynthia Goodman and had the idea to do an exhibition, in computer art exhibition, in the mid-80s, that we started. We had initiated the Eberson Museum where I had been doing some things. And IBM funded it and we were able to travel it. But it was shown as a big art exhibition in New York at the IBM Museum. But the IBM, IBM is a huge art collection. And they were very well respected for that collection. But they were not one of the recognized real art venues either. They weren't a museum, they weren't any gallery, anything that. I had the opportunity to take Clem Grimberg through that entire exhibition. And after he looked at all the work, I said to him, as has been said, is it art? Because that was a big question everyone was asking. Is this art? What is this? Is it art? We have questioned him how to talk about it. The computer wasn't, in the terms of what I was doing, wasn't making the art. It was the input from the artist that was controlling and directing the machine to make the art. But that wasn't understood by, or to anyone. And I asked him if it was art. And he said, it might be art, but a lot of it is bad art. And I think there was a lot of stuff made that just wasn't that great, either. So yes, we're all struggling to make art. And some of our work turned out to be good art. But there was still this very, oh wow factor, sort of like, I sort of identified this with one of my first classes of students. The first work they handed in, I looked at slides and I put them next to the work they could submitted to be accepted to the MFA program. And the quality of the work was not equal. And I sort of said, you know, everyone, the first thing they see when they did with the computer was sort of this, oh wow factor, because they could do it. And it was almost more like a dancing, you know, the dancing bear that you could do it at all. And it took a little more time, I think, for artists to get into the tool and really understand to be able to make it their own and start making the same quality work they would make with any tools once they got more professional at it. I think it's a perfect response to RC and great insight on some of the shows that you were helping together and the responses of people that you kind of walk through these shows. You kind of have first-end experience and a lot of these public kind of outcry sometimes are responses to it. And then Dan, I see you're unmuted now. So you want to add in your thought? Yeah, as long as we're beating up on the art world, I would like to point out that the acceptance of photography went through a similar thing. So it isn't really an issue about computers in general. It's either an issue about, you know, the art world being, you know, a bunch of hard to move people. And you know, as late as 1960s when I started to kind of work in an art school, there were, I mean, photographers in one, the battle, everybody agreed that it was art. But there was still discussion about it and had to do with them, you know, using an instrumentality instead of, you know, somehow stuck with their hands. So, but I kind of disagree with Darcy on the quality front because some of this early work that was done is was still completely amazing. And although as a community, we grow and get better and better, but some of that early work still stands up completely. Oh, I agree. Somebody early work does send up. There's no question. Find the same thing, right, with any other medium, whether it's film, whether it's theater, or the, you know, it's great and a lot of it is just out there. Yeah, I can add quickly. I definitely agree with the comment about computer graphics that to kill a phrase, computer art, yes. I think the real problem is the audience, like when I first showed, I had an experience called Conquest of Form that started off the old Fini Gallery, nice fine art gallery. And it toured for four years. But by the end, the venues that wanted to take the show were mass, mass public venues, like the Natural History Museum, the Deuchers Museum, the Science Museum in Munich. And so the audience was not your art crowd. It was the Joe public. They would, they'd stand in front of my big C.B. Chrome prints and have their photos done. And these were not people that were going to art galleries. It was the big shift in the audience. And then I can remember having a meeting with a number of art world directors and they asked me a key question. They said, you know, your mutate is software. Can it produce millions of images? And I said, yes, it's called the potential. It's not even ten millions, you know, and they said, what? And they said, well, you know, in the art world, it's all about rarity. In fact, they want artists to produce too much work, but your computer can turn these images out indefinitely. And so it was a big mismatch. I didn't get on well with the directors. They accused their sculptors of being like cavemen, chiteling. And I said, it was very primitive. And the future of the world is computers, not just chiteling rocks. They definitely didn't like that. But I think it's really working out who your audience is in the late 90s. I really engage with the much bigger audience. And I think that was the challenge. Maybe this minting process has kind of brought the rarity value back into the frame and the randomness in some great work and maintaining quality in that space. But there's a big cultural shift. And I think it's one always harps, you know, harps backs the art world, but the audience is much bigger for this work. Much more exciting. The art world is an industry. And there are pieces of it. They're the artists, the galleries, the museums, then the auctions kind of came in and sort of squeezed a lot of the galleries out more recently. And I think, you know, one of the big issues that I keep coming. up against is that the people who you might want to help you sell this artwork just don't know how to talk about it. They don't feel comfortable really presenting it. A lot of it, if you have to plug it in or it requires any technology, that's also a big has been a big issue. I think the 80s, none of that was sorted out. I mean, it's still a problem today. People want to know for me what size is that picture? I say to myself, well, the aspect ratio is what it is, but it could be any size. It's digital. Well, there's no way to say this to someone who's looking to get something for their home. You say to them, you can do that in a commission situation. But in the 80s, there was just no way to explain the options that people even had to acquire this work. That's a really great comment, I think, Darcy about not knowing how to contextualize the work. Yes, there were people who are absolutely against it, hook line and sinker. We all have our stories. But I remember a conversation I had once, I don't know when it was. It might have been in the early 90s with Holly Solomon and if any, remember her, she had a well-respected gap in New York and some mutual friends introduced us. And she said, "Gee, I really like what you're doing." She said, "But I don't know how to talk about it. I don't know how to. I just don't understand it at its roots and so I'm uncomfortable around that in a professional sense. And I got that. I thought that was a very honest response." They do actually look at my work. They like it. They love it. But even when they exhibit in their galleries, they don't, and they're safe, just have no idea what to have to bring someone to it and explain anything or say anything. And you know, it's interesting about that too. I think is that video art was so well accepted because I think that generation of curators perhaps grew up with television. So it went in their comfort zone and they were able to promote it and work against computer art in many ways was when it came to the Museum of World and so forth. It would be thrown to the video curators who actually didn't understand it at all. And I think that was one of the things that made it difficult to move forward was the wrong people were the ones who were putting a decision making position. That's changed now, but with this AI, we have the same view that AI is going to replace people. Just right. Yeah, and is it art? The media, you know, when I was putting out microart stuff, we were sort of competing with the games industry. That was the idea. We had, you know, sets of art rather than cassettes games, but you know, I never saw it as being a print thing or a physical thing at all. I mean, it was never printed until 2020 for a show in retrospective in Leicester through the computer arts archive with Sean Clark. But it never even occurred to me to print it. It was just live art coming generated by the micro and you put it on BBC Micro and Spectrum and then it ended up on a network. It was never a physical thing and it never even occurred to me that it could be really. I didn't, you could, the only prints you could buy in those days was a tiny thermal printer with a kind of, I think it's 10, 10 years old, or I mean, who's going to do that? I've always been struck by, like many of you have recounted by the, I've experienced the antagonism and the indifference of the art world. And I'm always been struck by the irony of the art world in the sense that it has always sort of relished the avant-garde and produced all sorts of strange and weird things to see in the gallery. But at the same time, the art world has very conservative aspect to it. And it's very un-open to experiencing certain types of new experiences like Dan was saying. If they experience it similar to photography's difficulties in establishing itself as a legitimate visual form. It's not just digital. You think about, I mean, growing up, we would hear that the, you know, the Koso and the Fos and all these French artists and so on, we're not accepted by the academy and nobody will buy their stuff. And it dawned on me eventually that the academy is academia and it is all of the universities and all the people trained by the universities and all the people getting jobs in the galleries and the museums who are trained at universities. And these are the people who want to believe that they want to find the most innovative things in this and that and the other, but they're all coming from this academic place where they only can really go and see in directions they've learned about. And they miss everything. They always miss something really new. I'm not sure I agree about this thing about academia, having been in eight university for close to 40 years. The people who work in museums come out of the art history department and they barely acknowledge the people who are in the fine arts departments. And that education that's going on there is really quite different. And so, and I think that their attempt to either in the art history areas to either use new technology to teach their subject matter or even to be able to experience, for instance, my VR pieces, they felt that they were games and so they should bring their children to see this work that was not at all aimed at children. That they they hear VR, they see VR, they think children. And these are the people who are moving into these curator positions. Jumping back to the 80s, just to reminisce a bit more about that period. But guess it's worth the tail end of the 80s when I was active with Cigraf, et cetera. There was a lot of interesting stuff happening with VR, like the legible city piece by shore. And then there was the A-Life crowd, Carl Simms, the Dawkins stuff. It was a very interesting phase. You've got like the early 80s, you've got the mid 80s, and then the tail 80s, you get A-Life. And also precursors some of the AI stuff that's happening now where creative control is passed over to the computer and back to the artist again. So when you're looking at the 80s, I think there are probably three phases. And at the tail end of the 80s, the dominance of Cigraf starts to shift to people, like Arts Electronic, I see there's a kind of broadening out. And as probably computer art becomes more popular. But definitely a very interesting period of time. Cigraf up to that point had been quite competitive each year. Everyone would turn up with their new paper or their algorithms. They have a bit of video to go with that. It was like, well, these really bright people competing. That's what fueled Cigraf. But by the end, there was a shift. And I think that was very interesting. And that kind of lays a lot of groundwork, what comes next. Yeah. And I think we can probably hand this over to Peter to move on to the next question. And also apologies as this has already went over time, but this is a very thoughtful discussion. If anyone has to obviously head out for any reason, feel free to just kind of drop off without any saying anything. But if you want to stick on for a little bit more, we can ask maybe a couple more questions. The discussion is very fruitful and it's been awesome so far. So I'll let Peter kind of take it from here. Yeah. I mean, I have a million questions. But maybe I'd like to hear from Stephen and maybe we can direct open this up to everybody after that. So it just relates a bit to what you're saying William. So I called the chapter of the 80s. I called it the PC era, the personal computer era. So I'm wondering, do you agree with that title chapter? What would you have called it, Stephen? I'm afraid I've got to rush now until I haven't done that. I can answer it for you, Stephen. Thanks for inviting me. Thank you so much for joining us, Stephen. It was so lovely to have you. Yeah, thank you so much, Stephen. I would call the 90s the PC era. I think everyone was still getting the most out of supercomputers. You know, Calducci was working with Nip on electronics, Carl Simpson was thinking machines. You know, anyone who was doing heavy duty work had to get into a corporate environment. I think the PCs came later. You know, definitely for me, you know, I did the organic package for PC, but that was into the 90s. I think the 80s, there was still a lot of innovation. Other people may have a different view, but I, yeah, I, you know, and also the 80s, the internet was still mainly within corporations. The 90s is, you know, the age of cyber culture. That was a different. The PC comes with that. I have to agree with William's comments there because I had that same experience. I mean, I loved PCs. I started building my own machines as early as the 70s, which were essentially personal computer. And I followed it. I owned a bunch of them in the 1980s. I used it for writing and all of that. But when it came to making art, for my purposes, they weren't there yet. It was really at the beginning of the 90s where things really turned around for that. And same deal, as you just said with the internet, I can still remember the first time I started sending pictures to magazines and things by sending J-Pigs over the web. And it was just mind blowing. No more slides, no more FedEx, no more any of that. So there were those sorts of revolutions. And so the transition to PCs definitely happened during the 80s. But the actual manifestation for artists, at least for me on a real time basis, was the 90s. And one last tag on that was, as late as 1979, I remember I did a talk in Berkeley with John Whitney Senior at Catwell. And afterwards, I got together at Stanford with some computer musicians to talk about things. And the discussion came up of, will we see real PCs in our lifetime? In our lifetime. And these were highly knowledgeable people. And would there be such a thing as the internet where all human culture would be available? And I made a bet with them that the year 2000, I could walk into a room, a personal computer that would be affordable and download a particular piece of Irish literature. That was the bet. And that happened that year in 2000. So it was really the 90s. I agree that were the transition point for that. All of the building blocks were there in the 80s, but the real manifestation in people's and artist lives was right after that. The computers used in art college in 1980s were high end stations, proper computer graphics, machines with huge monitors and other other stuff. They're very expensive. There's only a personal computer that a normal person would use. And it was later in the 90s that the PCs came out and the 80s had to work at a bit of a lot after Microsoft's networking piece. The original IBM, I think it was XTs we were using. The PC's XTs and 80's were the three first IBM machines. And they were going into the dealing rooms, the market trading dealing rooms in London. And a lot of people had work networking, people like me were kind of networking these things for people like IBM. I mean, the potential insurance had a main frame in the insurance company looked after IBM, but they didn't know anything about the IBM PC. It's better hire a micro person, me in other words, to go in a network, the whole system for the dealers. And even then it was a fairly primitive, but previously they were using bits of paper to pass their sales back and forth. And all that was in the midget. And not just any of the artists who were using Apple twos and all kinds of, you know, the VR ask, there were many devices and artists. I just want to say that I completely disagree with that. I went through four different personal computers between 1978 and 1990. I have an extensive exhibition record from that time. I used these computer installations and the I, you know, the 90's is a continuation. We all played with PCs. I mean, they were wonderful, but it depends what you were trying to do, of course. This is a good point, a good transition because I'm happy to open it up if you want to ask any questions to each other at this point or bring up any topics that you wanted to discuss. Yeah. My question, you know, you gave me four questions. And the one that I was interested in was number four, which is, did you feel there was less gender life than the 80s as Grant Taylor's article, which references you seems to indicate it apparently masculinized soon after. Was this your experience copper? And I don't know. There's a whole other part to it. So maybe you can read it yourselves. I think you covered most of it. The question is, do you feel there was less gender bias in the 80s as an article that I shared by Grant Taylor, who interviewed several computer artists at that time? Yeah. Including you. He interviewed myself and I had a couple comments about this. One, I was in a really supportive community in Chicago and I didn't feel any gender bias there. I felt a tremendous amount of gender bias in the art world. It was a masculineized world. You know, not only did they, were they not interested in computers, they were not interested in women who made any. So there's that. The other thing about the computer graphics world, and I know I'm referencing the 90s here, but one of the pieces I did in the 90s was to look at how researchers in computer graphics imaged women's bodies, which we experienced all the time. And the majority, they were very, these women's bodies were very sexualized from a male point perspective. And they were just thrown at us that this is research and we have to use a sexy female for this. And so I documented and showed it at Cigraf and a lot of my responses from men at Cigraf, who were predominant in the research area, was, oh, well, we really hadn't realized this. And that was showing what their biased view of women was. So I don't think it was up for grabs or wide open. I felt like in the community in Chicago, I got a lot of support. I got a lot of support, but I don't know that, and I certainly in the organization Cigraf, they were willing to tolerate my critique of them in terms of how they dealt with women's bodies. It's a really powerful video. I saw it recently and it's shocking how women are portrayed by the even Cigraf members. I don't think it was a wildly gender-free area in the '80s. I just disagree with that. But I do feel that the community in Chicago, where I was, was very supportive. Welcome back, Darcy. Hopefully connections are a bit better now. Can you hear me now? Yes, perfect. Yeah. I wanted to add a story to perspective. I don't know. It's maybe a totally different discussion by now. But one of the things that I remember thinking in the '80s was that up until about 85, we knew every artist who was using computers and their work pretty much. And in '85, that population so exploded with the advent of the Mac, having full color, that things really did change. And a huge, huge, additional number of artists started using these tools. Now, the other thing is, this discussion today has really been very technology-centric in many ways. There were so many different areas of art. We didn't say a word about gaming, which was huge. There was the whole, and then the ways in which artists were using these tools to make really interesting digital images. We didn't talk about the difference between what was going on in terms of real-time graphics versus computed graphics. One of the big things is everybody that was using computers was using systems that people were developing the algorithms for. I mean, yeah, there weren't software packages to buy, but there wasn't software. Everyone was writing what they needed now. Many of the people writing that software were very seriously good programmers, and they were in organizations, commercial, and all over technology ones, and in lots and lots of places. And artists, like myself, fit into that world without needing to program. It wasn't necessary. It didn't make sense for me, at NYIT, to try and write my own software when I could say to Tom Duff, "Could you write me an hack that would do blah, blah, blah?" And he would literally walk by the computer, pass his hand over the keyboard, not even slow down, and it would be done. It was clear to. So I want to say the '80s, I think, did change a lot, because the tools became available to so many more artists and so many more people. And also, I started the program in computer art at the School of Visual Arts, I think it was '86. That was the first time a college for art had such a thing, and that proliferated all over the world very quickly. So the '80s saw a lot of change. I built my own computer also. I bought my own, you know, frame buffer. I did all the hardware stuff. My partner did all the software stuff. You know, I had my own paint system written. This whole generative thing is such a. It's a piece, and it's getting a lot of publicity now, but it's so not the whole story. And yeah, that's a great point. Maybe we can bring it. and Dan because you mentioned Darsie, you mentioned games and I love to bring in copper and Dan and their contribution to video game art in the early 80s with grass and sea grass. I love to talk about that. Very unusual place and it was huge talent there. A lot happened in Chicago. A lot. Yeah Dan, but why don't you jump in please? Yeah, it was an amazing time and there was this large sharing community and so we got a lot of stuff done in terms of development but the and one of the topics that was in the list that I was kind of interested in is just the concept of generative art which is one of the themes and how it's changing now. I mean if you look at this gadget I taught a class in our class it had the basic programming system and they would generate images and of course it couldn't do anything but generative art. It had no way to get images in. I mean you had a joystick but I don't know anybody that successfully drew with a joystick. And so it was just confined in a sense to generative art and that's one of the I think that was one of the positive things about about the experience to have the essentially the limitations where you simply head to. Then you jump to now and it's like me talking to you know to an AI system and saying I want an image of a large Viking family from Sweden having dinner and then it produces this big thing you know with a lot of fish on the table which is kind of and that's obviously generative art too but it's an entirely different experience for the person producing it and the generative art that was kind of done in the 80s and many respects went back to the platonic life of mathematics and things coming out of you know out of this other realm and so now I don't know what any longer means in terms of generative art because everything you do in art is rule based and for large chunks of it anyway. It's great that Dan has this picture of the Ballyart Crate Cate up there because you know that with an addition of a keyboard was and I did things on it. I was successful at using that joystick for drawing and I did a piece called Skippy Peanut Butter Jars and I wrote the software to do it and it was painful but I also came from a sculpture background and I was taught in sculpture to make my own tools so I came from a different a different a three-dimensional place. The other thing is that there were all these this video game industry in Chicago and there was something about this arcade that just lightened up the whole light your life. It was like I could smile because I was now in graduate school and I wasn't really smiling as a sculpture student really what hadn't been appropriate. You know one could be silly because this device was silly and because I had been exposed to computers all my life this was like the first time I could kind of laugh at it which humor is a part a whole part of a section of my work and I think that that went across a lot of the people using these devices because it was fun. I mean it was fun having problems and it was fun making this work and you had lots of people to work with and so that rich community made it all worthwhile. I mean and lots of funny things happened. My favorite thing about making Skippy peanut butter jars with this unit was that my piece which has nudes in it. Low resolution nudes was banned from the from the grad show in the Sears Tower because it had nudity in it. I mean it was really hard to process this but it couldn't be in this show because it was in a public place. So the idea and this goes to some of the other comments about where work was shown is that these public places have these rules about what's art and the idea of banning and nude from an art exhibition is in itself quite amusing especially when it's that low resolution. And I think that the matching of this video community in Chicago with this these budding small and computers was a really beautiful match. It just produced all sorts of different things. You know ranging from people ending up with things on pieces of paper, a mostly video but also interactive installations because it was set up to do that. Fascinating that also in Chicago was Sonia and what she was doing as well which is what also makes it such a remarkable. I agree. I mean you know at the same at the same time and there was a crossover with some of those people and sometimes it was really the budding of heads. You know of what didn't but if you think about the work that came from that group that had also originated with Xerox machines and the machines in the past to make generative things there was a very rich history. You made me think quite about the 80s that split on technology. I remember you're right people were using Macs to generate really nice graphics but in some ways there was a split between group wanted to do high-end photorealism and then the games were tended to be sprite based, vector based if they were in an arcade. There were mugs that was like Monkey Island but the games were pretty retro. They literally were at that time. There was a split between two communities I guess. I was able to get into corporate environments I got access to main friends but you're right there was a lot of other interesting work happening and I think the problem was after that with Silicon Graphics anyone who wasn't with all the corporation that wanted to produce photorealist work had to go and buy a Silicon Graphics machine which would be about the equivalent to $30,000 now. People literally have to take out a mortgage to buy a top-end machine and Silicon Graphics really stifled. They went bust in the end they really stifled creativity. The commercial graphics were starting to take off but it's interesting to record on that time. I don't think Silicon Graphics stifled anything. I think the push and cigarette to get more realism and that was really the focus of all the papers accepted and all the things that presented and that was really focused in the film industry. And SG was a big good partner. Maybe if we jump to Mark I'd like to hear a few more. I think it's more of a graphic so I think I'm quite expensive. I was going to ask a question of Ian. You moved into rave graphics and doing that kind of work with music. Did you work a lot with video artists as well? Or was it mainly your own work as it stands rather than being as they affected by the video VJ culture that was going on at the time? This would have been probably 90s wouldn't it? It's a slightly later. With my work there have been a huge audience comes back to the audience question of people that were going to raise in huge warehouses and dancing like lunatics taking ecstasy watching my videos. That was my audience drunk taking rave people. And I had a big following and I didn't even know about it was I was within IBM. So when IBM was scaling back on its scientific sense they got approached by different bands to produce all their graphics, album covers, directing videos. And then Universal Studios approached me. They thought my graphics looked like the thing. Would I produce a game for them and give me about seven million dollars to do that? It was a real doctor fastest situation. I sold myself the music industry and film industry. It was very interesting. But managed 13 years later to finally get back to doing interesting work. So you know rave music was very influential like color and the whole stuff I would envy done in VR later was very influenced by rave and how do you kind of deliver experiences which are the sort of belong in a very very direct experiences. But yeah I decided not to go back into the art world or into the academic world and just went into commercial space which it was big pros and cons. You know I would Steve and I restarted work with him at like 13th class years later we picked up the work like from the day before. He said what were we doing 15 years ago and saying would written a book because all the software had deteriorated and we were able to go to the book and re-implement all the algorithms from the book that we'd written. Well, we didn't realize there's lots of other people have done the same and produced their own graphics. Like a lot of generative art. Now, I can see hints of the algorithms in the book. So, you know, it's an interesting tale. So my, you know, I'm back during art again, but I, you know, I lost, you know, 13, 15 years just in, you know, dealing with Hollywood and the music industry was interesting, but ultimately boring. So I'm rambling out a bit there, but it's a good question. My audience comes back like with a doitchess museum, a naturalist museum. They were the indication, the audience, for this time works much bigger. It's mass market. It's not for the elite art market. Great response, William, and kind of the influence that ray of aesthetics and kind of electronic music has kind of had for digital art in general. So if we can maybe push over to Mark, maybe this is something we kind of heard from some past people in the call ready, but a lot of you kind of come from painter backgrounds. You were pushing paint on a canvas and then kind of transformed into working with computers. And maybe Mark, can you maybe expand more on how starting out as a painter influenced kind of your geometric background? Or you also kind of talked about your predispose to some of these images of like micro processors and computer parts that kind of influence a lot of your work. Maybe just expanding on that would be wonderful to hear about. Sure. I first, I just wanted to make a comment about everyone's dialogue here and it's quite extraordinary how we all started out. And there is basically no context for what we were doing or very little context. People had made used computers to make art in the in the 70s, but we all sort of had to invent this all by ourselves. And we all did it in different ways. And we all had different kinds of access to hardware and software and it's fascinating how we all got involved in this and sort of invented all this by in our own in our own ways. It's a perfect way to kind of wrap everything up and to offer our perspectives. It's an amazingly interesting talk, but again Mark, you you you summed up really perfectly how diverse everybody's skills and talents and interests and hardware and software live. And yeah, I'd like to if anybody else would like to maybe have any closing thoughts. I just wanted to say I think it was William who made this comment. I was really interested in it just to say as it moves to the 90s. I think you said that you thought that SIGGRAPH started to change at the end of the 80s because the focus of all the research was expanding out. And and then there was the and then I see a came about and and um ours electronic and some other exhibitions. And I think that those exhibitions had a stronger focus on artists. The focus was artists whereas SIGGRAPH was this collective of of research and art and everything. And I think that helped defocus what happened. And also academia started you know it eventually got PhDs in art and people could artists could write papers and needed to get credit. And then you see that where SIGGRAPH is now versus where it was in the 80s where everybody was there. And that relates to what Darcy said about you like new everybody you'd heard of them except the only correction to that I would say is it was very American and I because I now spend a lot of time in Europe I realize and my through my reading that I was quite ignorant of things that were going on in Europe Asia and South America and even Africa and that that's been and that was going on in the 80s. And I was very fragmented. I agree it was very fragmented. Thank you very much. I was great here all of you. Walk I really learned some things. Thank you. Thank you so much everybody. We can't really say it enough it's such an honor. Really good really good event thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Bye. Thank you. Thank you Darcy. Thank you for Jeff. Thank you. Thank you. Bye bye guys. Take care. Nice to see you, Dan.