H I S T O R Y, page 2
One day in 1984 I woke up and realized I'd spent most of the last eight years in a dark room in a computer lab with radiation pouring into my eyeballs. I relocated to New Mexico and spent several months looking at light.
When I returned to JPL, the hardware had been upgraded to a DEC VAX 780 that displayed millions of colors simultaneously instead of the mere 256 colors I'd been working with up to that point. Danae was one of the first images I made with that setup.
The Far Away is a frame from a virtual world I created that brought about a further evolution of my thinking. The environments I built were full of surprises I hadn't actually intended in the original design. Whenever I ran across these anomalies, I'd document them. Without realizing it, over time my digital imaging process had become a form of snapshot photography, which loosened up my whole approach to making and taking pictures
Around the same time, I started thinking of my images as life forms. I began to perceive them as frames in an evolving flow of dynamic compositions that grew into and out of one another. Maithuna is from a series of pictures that had a kind of genetic correspondence. In those days even big scientific computers were so slow that I often had to render pictures in extremely low resolution. A couple years ago I up-res'd the original file, so the final image took over two decades to produce.
In the late Eighties JPL's NASA funding dried up. It was the end of an era. All the machines in the lab were still humming, but there were no warm bodies to care for them. The place took on the character of a ghost lab. Net was the last picture I made there. Personal computers finally existed, small mammals that would soon topple the big dinosaurs of the computing world, but they weren't sufficiently evolved to run the kind of software I'd been working with for over a decade. For quite a while I was at loose ends.
In 1991 Apple invited me to experiment in their Evangelism Group's multimedia lab. I worked on a Mac IIfx with 32 megabystes of memory and a 1.3 gigabyte hard drive, the absolute bleeding edge in desktops then. I used off-the-shelf programs like Photoshop for the first time. I got interested in populating my virtual worlds and making the characters aware of their surroundings. Womb came from a world inhabited by a passel of electronic creatures.
DAVID EM