[NetBehaviour] COMPUTER BAROQUE online exhibition

[Richard]

Animate Projects presents:

COMPUTER BAROQUE
defining works in the history of digital moving image -  an online 
exhibition curated by Richard Wright

until 14 July 2009
http://www.animateprojects.org/films/by_project/computer_baroque/baroque


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