Graduates, Faculty and Friends...

I am both honored and surprised to be here today in my present capacity. Here I am, an engineer, receiving an honorary degree from an Art and Design school. The formal reason I've been asked here is for my contributions to computer graphics technology. But the fact that I am here is significant for a number of other interesting reasons, all of which have to do with the evolving relationship between Art and Science in our society.

First, although the faculty and administration may not be aware of it, is the fact that in a sense I am an alumnus of the New School. In 1976, when I was a graduate student in the Engineering School of the University of Utah, I spent the summer on Long Island working at the New York Institute of Technology where I was a member of a research group which laid many of the foundations of modern computer animation. And each week my fellow computer graphics engineers and I would come in to the city and attend a course at the New School called The History of Animation, taught by Leonard Maltin. This is an example of the interest that we engineers have always had in the art and craft of computer graphics as well as the mathematics and electronics of it.

The Second point of significance of my being here is the fact that I was involved in the process of another design school getting into computer graphics, The Art Center Center College of Design in Pasadena. Back in 1983 I taught a first course in computer graphics at the Art Center. We had three Atari home game computers with screen resolutions of 160 by 120 pixels, and 16 colors per pixel. Since there was no software a friend of mine and I sat up each Wednesday night writing programs in a language called Basic for the students to feed data through. The course content was actually pretty broad. The students used a joystick based painting program, they designed video game characters to be made out of an 8x8 array of pixels, They had to use the keyboard to type in x's and o's to enter the shapes into the computer. Our program would then overlay the characters onto their painted backgrounds and allow them to drive them around with the joystick. The students sketched 3D shapes on graph paper and counted up the boxes to get 3D coordinates. They used a word processor to type in numerical coordinate data and our programs would display and rotate the shapes on the screen. (And I learned many lessons about how easy it is for artists to find bugs in programs.) The fact that we got students to put up with these crude user interfaces to produce equally crude images is an example of the interest that the designers had in the then untested and, to some, unpromising prospects of computer graphics.

In the past hears, the concept of using computers to create art and design has gone from being a crazy idea to a standard technique. Computer graphics is now cheap and powerful enough to satisfy the exacting meeds of digital pre-press and Hollywood special effects. We talk casually of images thousands of pixels on a side and image files in the tens of megabytes. It is now no more unusual to expect that a graphic designer know how to use a computer than to expect them to know how to use a telephone.

But I think that the most important result of the computer graphics revolution is not that it has provided better tools for artists. It concerns what has happened to the people involved. Engineers who make artists tools have had to learn what artists DO. When they try to mathematically simulate lighting they've been motivated to go art museums. When they try to mathematically simulate trees and clouds they've been motivated to actually go out and look at nature. Now, consider the artists and designers. They now wallow in operating system version numbers and file format conversion programs. Many designers write their own programs to produce unique effects. And I think that most of them have come to appreciate that mathematical equations can stand for geometric shapes. And that mathematics can be as beautiful as sculpture. I think that the most important result of the computer graphics revolution is that it has helped heal the gulf between Art and Science.

And how about my own personal odyssey through this? For the first 16 years of my career I spent my time developing the tools of computer graphics. But then I realized that few people remember who invented oil paints; most people remember the artists who use them. So for the past 12 years I have been using tools rather than building them. In my current projects I've become a graphical designer. I spend more time picking colors and balancing compositions that I do writing equations. Part of the reason I have been able to do this is that the creative process of mathematics and art are more similar than is realized by those who do only one or the other. In his book "The Illusion of Life" on of the great Disney animators Frank Thomas refers to the art of animation as problem solving. His problems were how to communicate the emotions and motivations of his characters, how to draw the eye to certain actions and so forth. This was a great revelation to me. I has always thought of problem solving in purely mathematical terms. But now I see it in more general terms.

So, now that the majority of the technical problems in computer graphics have been solved, I believe that the future belongs to those like yourselves who can actually use these tools to teach, to tell a story, to communicate, to bring joy. And now that I have been officially certified as being an artist, I'm proud to be one of you.