My mom bought me a book from 1970 “Tje Computer and Music” edited by Harry B Lincoln, in 1975 when I started my computer science classes at Washington University (Saint Louis). It changed my life. I did some computer music work at Iowa State University, and got my computer engineering degree there. I never took a job in the field but it continues to fascinate me.

Better than many new cgi movies today

I remember this film. I checked it out of our local county library around the mid 70s I think.

Interesting that the music isn't synth.

Great find! I've seen the film in overviews of Structural Film, and animation history classes at art school. Computers and art have history together fo sho

It's amazing how this has all become so silly looking. Man, it was the razor edge back in the day. I remember the Cola (I think it was cola) commercial, the mercury girl. It blew me away. But, sadly, nothing dates an era like technology as it moves so very fast.

that's an ayahuasca trip if you ask me

I can't believe ZUN invented Touhou in 1968...

It cost 400000 dollar to generate 12 seconds

Great! Enjoyed this very much, subbing!

This could easily beat my Ryzen system hands down!!!

Seems like someone has been busy with styrograph here...

3:35 Swastika alert. Hope the PC squad has the day off. 🤣

Thx for posting this. Whitney did mindbuggering stuff. Before digital computers, he apparently used a modified electromechanical targetting computer to draw this stuff; the kind they used on battleships. This guy was _beyond_ hardcore. There's a few more of films on YT (Catalog, Arabesque, Matrix III), tho the quality (of the transfer) leaves a lot to be desired compared to what we see here. Thx again!

That’s what it looks like inside of CERN the large Hydron collider when it’s colliding particles

No viewing of John Whitney's film work is complete with also watching "Arabesque" from 1975.

Do you need LSD to fully experience and appreciate this art?

If you watched that on LSD you would have a meltdown.

I'm getting Gumbasia vibes (probably because of the music). This is a really cool find!

Just amazing to think that 15 years later, you could put a quarter in an arcade machine and _be in control_ of something like this, except while some other collection of glowing dots was trying to kill you. My initial thought was that all film was shot in black and white, and then they filtered it as they projected it onto the screen from multiple projectors at the same time. This part they would film in color, and there's the movie. I like the musical selection and think it was very well chosen. It's one of those times I can hear something like 5:3 polyrhythms and think "did they just... oh yeah, that's kinda what the film is about."

I made an apple record my radio useing the 555 chip.

I could swear I saw Permutations in 70 or 71. Even the music is familiar. I saw lots of interesting things the average kid didn't, because of the people I was spending most of my time with...connected to the university, and they were optimistic in a way the world could use now.

I love my HP85. And the EBTKS. Found a forum post pointing to an aliexpress store selling paper that works just fine on the 85.

Amazing!

Jeff Minter eat your heart out!

oh -- hi! i didn't see you there either! :-D

Step by step textual directions would be helpful.

whoever has the original film needs to re-convert it with a better film scanner, and better compression, this one looks like it was done in the early 2000's with a webcam and QuickTime.

It looks like Spiro-Graph.

Amazing for 1968. Can't believe I've never seen this before! 🤯👍

You need to wear a microphone of some kind as the audio is rather low and a bit challenging to hear clearly, especially when you turn away from the camera. G7VFY

Wonder if these techniques are still useful for low latency visual affects.

It's a shame the capture is so low-resolution --- the extreme pixelation combines unpleasantly with KZbin compression to complete wreck a lot of the fine detail. If a cleaner capture ever shows up, I'd be really interested to see it.

I'd love to find a copy of Tomato Bushy Stunt Virus, which was a computer animation of, well, the Tomato Bushy Stunt Virus showing how the three different proteins that combine to form the capsule, well, combine to form the capsule. If I remember properly only the protein backbone (and maybe only the alpha carbons) were shown. I saw it in 1990 or 1991 just before the ACS meeting in Washington DC, but even then it was pretty old.

When I was younger a friend swapped me his C 128D for my C64 so I could use the 1571 for a BBS I was operating. I absolutely loved that machine. I miss it to this day. When I first saw the Amiga 1000 I wondered if Commodore had extra 128D cases. lol.

Wonderful channel. Great video. Just subbed. Just liked.

There's just 10 types people in the world today that understand binary.! Those who do, and those who don't. 🔵🔴

amazingly it looks like the atom

beautiful

I like how it doesn't show a rotating 3D object at any point, despite obviosly being able to, it's like they knew it would immediately make it look dated for a distant future viewer.

Now I know where John Bonham got the idea for the Moby Dick solo

I bought my first computer in 1982....it has 16k of RAM, a 90k disk drive and a resolution of 256x192. This would have blown me away. It still does, except now my mind sees the code running.

Saw some of his works at the moma

That's very interesting music, Marthy

Never been too impressed with his movies. Neither from a technical or artistic point of view. Technically they are just animated Spirograph and analog integrators. Much more impressive stuff was happening at the time. The intro to Vertigo is basically as good as it got.

Amazing. In 1973 - 1975 I worked with others on a project to use a computer to play music. For this we developed and built what we at the time called an "interface" that connected a computer - in this case a computer from Wang - with a synthesiser. It was as big as a large suitcase and was a forerunner of what we now call a sound card or sound chip. This "interface" generated quite a bit of interest in the pop music world and we sold a couple of them to people such as Kraftwerk, Frank Zappa and even Paul McCartney. We were definitely onto something big, but needless to say, we didn't have a Steve Jobs, Elon Musk or Bill Gates among us who could have turned our small Garage workshop into a multinational enterprise and after a couple of years we all went our different ways.

Wow! That must have taken a very long time to generate all those graphic equations. Specially with the technology of the time. Thank you!

I wonder if this was influenced at all by the Spirograph toy, which was popular around 1968. It reminds me of it.

Interesting

WoW! That was fantastic to discover. It reminded me of some Norman McLaren's works. Thank you so much for sharing.