Chicago Computer Artist Accelerates To Warp Speed
"Softalk" (February 1983): 227,229.


Just south of the loop, south of the La Salle Street banks, south of the 
Michigan Avenue hotels, south of the State Street department stores, lives an 
epic host of poor, underprivileged Chicagoans. Artist Jane Veeder is on the 
leading edge of a new age in electronic expression, yet she lives in the slums 
on South Halsted Street in a split-level studio apartment.

In that apartment, Veeder and her fellow artist Phil Morton have an impressive 
array of computer gadgetry, including a Datamax UV-1 Graphics Computer, a 
Sandin Image Processor, and assorted video equipment. CRT buses shake the 
building when they roar up Halsted just outside the front door, but they have 
little effect on the concentration of Veeder and Morton.

Veeder's latest creation, WARPITOUT, made quite an impressive debut at the 
SIGGRAPH '82 Art Show in Boston this summer. Held annually for the last nine 
years by the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on 
Computer Graphics, SIGGRAPH is the Academy Awards for computer artists. In 
Veeder's own words, WARPITOUT is an "interactive computer graphics 
installation, supporting real-time color graphics processing of a digitized 
(facial) image of the current player using a menu-driven selection of drawing 
and processing programs, housed in a video-game cabinet."

Veeder's manifesto further explains the genesis of this computer game cum 
computer art program: "I had developed a number of generalized real-time 
computer graphics process program tools that I loved to play with. Some I had 
adapted into animation sequences, streamlined and stripped of their 
interactivity; others were still too slow for one-way performance. The recent 
development of our digitizer offered a wonderful opportunity to present these 
interactive programs in a menu-driven context for playing with everyone's 
favorite image... themselves."

Burned into EPROM and housed in a videogame cabinet, WARPITOUT allows the 
user/player to be Lon Chaney, Salvadore Dali, and Vincent Van Gogh with a 
digitized image of your own face.  It was a big hit at SIGGRAPH, but it raised 
many questions as to its status as a true work of art.

"Is it art? That's the first question. Let's go on to the next one," Veeder 
offers. How about an artistic video game? "With WARPITOUT, I'm using the 
universal appeal of your own face as a pretext to indulge in computer graphics 
more directly than you get to do with a commercial video game, where you're 
interacting with a finished product in restricted ways. ZGRASS makes possible 
an artist-integrated project such as WARPITOUT, as contrasted to the corporate-
designed video games accomplished by teams working in fragmentary and 
specialized roles."

All this talk of video games and video game technology is not coincidental. 
Veeder uses a system that was developed in her neighborhood; video game 
behemoth Bally is based in Chicago. She has just smartly adapted the technology 
to other, more personal uses.

A more traditional work of art is Montana, a three-minute color videotape 
complete with stereo sound. Every year Veeder takes a trip into the western 
mountains, and Montana is an attempt to capture her "love [of] the physical 
world out there and its attendant information aura."

Montana features a number of forms (mountain, hawk, buffalo, earth, Sears 
Tower, video camera, and more) made all very simple (in the way the Japanese 
mean it). Veeder took these simple forms and developed the visual relationships 
with a fluid program of her own design. The program enables her to draw with 
any of a collection of "snaps" (screen sections stored as arrays) and tools to 
make lines, boxes, and other shapes. She worked on the piece for a long time, 
producing a dynamic, arresting audio-visual experience.

Veeder and her partner Phil Morton are only two of many computer artists living 
and working in the Chicago area. Tom DeFanti and Dan Sandin of the University 
of Illinois at Chicago Circle have been very influential, mainly through their 
own development of new graphics technology. "I'm standing on a whole bunch of 
people's shoulders," says Veeder.

Veeder came from the world of video synthesis, which she feels is quite 
wonderful but akin to sex. "It's not too interesting for those watching." She 
supports herself by doing outside consulting work in the Chicago area, mainly 
instructing people how to use the ZGRASS language. She also says she's 
extremely addicted to real-time computer graphics.

"I am almost completely uninterested in still images other than photos for 
promotion or documentation. Real-time graphic performance resulting in a 
dynamic visual process is my priority and the motivation for my continuing 
growth as a programmer."

Living in a slum or not, Veeder is making history in computer art.

[The background picture is from WARPITOUT-- Veeder's own face jazzed up with 
the help of ZGRASS, an advanced graphics language. Inset, Veeder and her 
tools.]