Computer Graphics in the Era of AI: From the 1960s to the Present
Computer Graphics (also CG or CGI) was coined in 1960 by Boeing researcher Verne Hudson and graphic designer William Fetter. Several early 20th century fields led to the development of computer graphics including electrical engineering, electronics, and television. As home computers became more affordable, CG software became more accessible for mainstream users. My first exposure to CG was with ASCII-art that uses computers to make pictures, which are pieced together from printable characters (see below). My computer programmer mother printed out Peanuts characters for me on a dot matrix printer. I was also really into arcade video games such as Centipede, my all-time favorite.
In high school I majored in visual art and one of my art teachers introduced me to computer graphics. For a year, we used early Macintosh and Amiga computers with Deluxe Paint or DPaint, which was a bitmap graphics editor for the Amiga. Amiga was a family of personal computers introduced by Commodore in 1985. DPaint allowed users to create and edit images interactively on the computer screen. This included drawing lines and shapes with tools of different colors, sizes, etc., and compositing visual elements using layers (aka digital collage).
Collage was/is very much my favorite art style and practice and it showed up in my early CG projects (see Art of Anatomy above). I used DPaint a couple of years before Adobe introduced Photoshop to the world, when I created images such as this one using the new editor:
As a visual artist I was less interested in graphic design and 3D graphics and more into what was possible with digital collage, a computer-based art method created by layering a variety of virtual images and textures from different sources to create a whole new work of art. The main difference between the DPaint and Photoshop was the amount of pixel painting I had to do. With Photoshop I could cut and paste from myriad scanned digital images. For me, the digital collage process was no different from what I did using paper and other materials such as my drawings.
Last week I noticed how a stack of my pencil drawings done on tracing paper looked and decided to photograph the accidental collage to be used in a prompt in Midjourney. You can use images as part of a prompt to influence a job’s composition, style, and colors. In the text part of the prompt I referenced different art styles such as glitch art which is based on the practice of using digital or analog errors, more so glitches, for aesthetic purposes. I also used Photoshop to add flowers to the collage (see above).
Generative AI brings digital collage to new levels of complexity. However, the basic premise is the same: cutting and pasting from various sources to create something new. Many people never change the default settings in AI generators such as Midjourney (if allowed) and their results look similar to work from users who are not practicing artists. Collage + GenAI has helped me to move away from the limited parameters, to generate images that are unique to styles and methods that I’ve developed over the course of a few decades. Also, many note the speed in which you can generate different iterations of one prompt.
The word “collage” comes from the French “coller” meaning to paste. Today, I paste both images and text in the form of prompts and use older methods such as image style transfer that lets me take two images — a content image and a style reference image— and blend them together so the output image looks like the content image, but “painted” in the style of the style reference image. The image above was created using a combination of old and new methods to further develop my collage aesthetic.
Deep Dream Generator or DDG, my original AI generator/tool, is what I use to apply image style transfer but you can also do this using Photoshop. The three images above are the result of combining old and new collage methods in Midjourney, an AI generator that allows this to happen (not all tools do). This work is a continuation of a collage technique that I began exploring back in the 1980s, at the beginning of the computer-generated art (computer graphics) movement.