Engineers & Enthusiasts

By: Christopher J Garcia
Listen for free

  • Summary

  • Unaffiliated Researcher Christopher J Garcia looks at how computers changed the arts. Clips of interviews, performances, lectures and more combine with Chris telling the stories of the ways in which Computers became as instrumental to the Arts as the paintbrush, baton, camera, and chisel.
    Show More Show Less
Art Music World
Show More Show Less
activate_Holiday_promo_in_buybox_DT_T2
Episodes
  • Ken Knowlton, BEFLIX, and Bell Labs

    Ken Knowlton, BEFLIX, and Bell Labs
    Jun 28 2022
    Episode Notes Ken Knowlton passed away at the age of 91 last week. He was one of the leading figures in the establishment of computer graphics and animation Auto-Generated Transcript   EandE-Knowlton Wed, 8/3 2:04PM • 12:43 SUMMARY KEYWORDS bell labs, work, schwartz, computer graphics, computer, images, figure, ken norton, nude, newton, film, important, fields, lillian, matthews, technologist, picture, billy, smaller version, talking SPEAKERS Christopher Garcia   Christopher Garcia  There are a lot of people who could rightfully be called the founder of computer animation, you could make up a list of 10 people by the most knowledgeable people in the field. And there wouldn't be much overlap. But one name that would be guaranteed to be on every list is Ken Knolton, Ken Knolton passed away at the age of 91 this weekend, but he left behind a legacy that has led us to where we are today. This episode, we're talking about Kendall, Bell Labs, and BT. Vis is engineers and enthusiast. Ken Knolton likely is the figure that will receive the most attention when going back over the early days of computer graphics. And for good reason. His work at Bell Labs in particular, was massively important. And while we could go into everything from his work, doing natural language translation in sentences using voyeuristic forms, which, honestly is way beyond my mind, too, is more widely known work. In computer graphics, we're going to focus just on to this episode. And in the next, it's going to be all about eat experiments in art and technology. It'll make sense when you get there. Bell Labs, which you've talked about extensively, was the home of many geniuses. And I'll just focus on four of them. Claude Shannon, and John Pierce, Max Matthews, and Ken Norton. And in the 1960s, these were four of the biggest names in technology in much the same way. 10 years later, the names Don Knuth, John McCarthy, and Feigenbaum and Marvin Minsky represented the peak of their work, despite the fact they were across two different universities. But these four were all at Bell Labs, and that made Bell Labs, a locus, Shannon and Pierce's work cutting across disciplines, two of the most amazing scientists of the 20th century, a figure known to few nowadays, but was incredibly important, Richard Hamming. And he did something very interesting, he told Newton, who was working in all sorts of different sections. He told Knolton slow down, if everyone here made more than one contribution to the Bell System in his lifetime, the system would be in chaos. That is huge. He was looking at the possibility of parsing computer languages, for example, and using them to create images. And in the early 1960s, he developed BEFLIX, which is a sort of a shortening of belflex. And it was the first computer language designed specifically for bitmap moviemaking. Now there had already been some work in computer animation in particular, using things like vector images. That was what Ed's a Jack had done with his demonstration of it looks like a domino that keeps one face pointing towards the globe at all times really innovative.   Christopher Garcia  Mike Knoll was also there and doing some very interesting mathematical works using printers more often than images on a screen. And what they had was a microfilm printer. And so it could put images that would go normally on the screen on to 35 millimeter movie film. Very important idea. So, after a series, this series of subroutine was created, he came up with this concept that was very simple. It was two different qualities of frame that could be created using what we would today consider to be pixels of, I believe, six different intensities. And this would allow you to make relatively rough images, I think it was 256 was the width of each individual frame at a maximum. But this still allowed for excellent expression. And when you look at one of the most important films in the history of computer graphics, one that should 100% be on the National Film Registry. It's called a computer technique for the production of animated films.   Christopher Garcia  That alone To show that BEFLIX was a major step forward. What's also incredible is that BEFLIX was retired very quickly, he only did a few films with it. And one that he did was for a high level list processing language called L six, and is a demonstration of how l six works and pretty simple, but it is massively important to how they would move forward in the idea of computer graphics. No, worked nowadays somewhat controversially, with Lillian Schwartz. And apparently there was an unhappiness with me being a very big proponent of Schwartz as an innovator in the computer graphics world. And he didn't quite like me, apparently. The idea here, though, is very important. This was the application of computer graphics and computer animation in an artistic context. Whereas BEFLIX had been used previously to do things like the demonstration of how you would make ...
    Show More Show Less
    13 mins
  • The Samson Box

    The Samson Box
    Jun 13 2022
    Episode Notes

    Gareth Loy's Article on The Samson Box - https://muse.jhu.edu/article/522167/figure/fig01 More info on the box - https://www.musicainformatica.org/topics/samson-box.php

    Find out more at https://engineers--enthusiasts.pinecast.co
    Show More Show Less
    29 mins
  • Episode 4 - The Birth of CCRMA

    Episode 4 - The Birth of CCRMA
    Jun 21 2019

    We begin a multi-part look at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (pronounced Karma) by looking at it's birth within the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab (SAIL), the DC Power Lab (in the hills above Stanford), and the work of John Chowning and many others!

    You can support Engineers & Enthusiasts through our Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/3MinModernist

    Find out more at https://engineers--enthusiasts.pinecast.co
    Show More Show Less
    26 mins

What listeners say about Engineers & Enthusiasts

Average customer ratings

Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.

Audible.co.uk reviews

Amazon reviews
No Reviews are Available