Artist Blog #2: Charles Csuri

In Paul Hertz's essay Art, Code, and the Engine of Change, he prefaces his essay stating, " we swim but do not know the meaning of water". Hertz is alluding to the way in which many people take for granted the aestethics behind digital art. Computer technology is so pervasive in our everyday lives it is easy to be oblivious to the ways digital art is created. While it is easy to go on photoshop and play around with the endless effects/filters you can apply to different images, its important to understand where they came from and appreciate how they were made. One pioneer who is known for his tremendous advancements in the medium of computer art is Charles Csuri. 

Charles Csuri is an artist and computer graphics professor at the Ohio State University. Not only an artist, Csuri had been an all american football player at Ohio State as well as serving in WWII. Celebrated as an all american football star, Csuri could have played professionally but instead choose to pursue his love for art. He began to exhibit his painting in NYC from 1955-1965 where he began to gain noterioty. His research activity in computer animation and graphics has received international recognition and acclaim as well as being known as "father of digital art and computer animation" by Smithsonian. 

The artwork above is known as the "Sine Curve Man". This piece was a collaborated work with Csuri and James Schaffer in 1967. During his early years Csuri was interested with the geometric transformations of images and the ways images could be manipulated. The sine curve man was created by superposing many images of a sine curve to create the image of a man. This picture interested me having had to made sine curves on my calculator in many high school math classes. I found it interesting that Csuri's simple sine man was so revolutionary to digital media. The transformation of the sine graph linked the computer together with art and paved the way for other digital artist to drawn from. 

Its funny to think this simple transformation had such an effect on the way we use digital art today.  Csuri innovated the ways in which artists could conceptually manipulate images digitally on a computer. One of the effects which I enjoyed using with in my first project was the warp tool. Taking an arbitrary dull image and applying the warp tool really had a tremendous effect on my work and helped to make my desired effect of a vortex-like shape. Like i said before, its really fun to play around on applications like photopshop and illustrator without even knowing how these options were made. At least now I have more appreciation for these effects and there foundation.