Charles Csuri — Hummingbird

1967

Artists: Charles Csuri, James Shaffer (programmer-collaborator) · Year: 1967 · Medium: Computer-generated 16mm film, black-and-white · Substrate: IBM 7094 mainframe; program in FORTRAN; Calcomp plotter output then filmed · Place: Columbus, Ohio, USA · Institution: Ohio State University Charles Csuri and the engineer James Shaffer created Hummingbird in 1967 at Ohio State University. It is a ten-minute computer-generated animated film produced on an IBM 7094 at the OSU Research Center, with hand-rotoscoped line-drawing source material of a humming bird in flight that Csuri had produced with a pen on tracing paper. The computer processed the line drawings — roughly 35,000 frames — through a set of algorithmic transformations Csuri had specified, scrambling, dissolving, and reassembling the bird's form through a sequence of geometric manipulations. The output, rendered one frame at a time onto a microfilm plotter, was photographed onto 16mm film and edited into a ten-minute release print. Hummingbird premiered at the 1968 Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition at the ICA in London and won the Ohio State Film Festival that year. It was acquired, in a highly-unusual move, by the Museum of Modern Art shortly thereafter — making Csuri one of the earliest American artists whose computer-generated work entered a major museum collection. The acquisition was specifically the 16mm film print, not a drawing or a printout. What the film does, beyond its period specifics, is argue for two distinct claims at once. The first is that computer animation could be lyrical and expressive rather than merely demonstrating the machine's capabilities. The second, embedded in the production process, is that the artist's hand-drawn line and the computer's procedural transformation could coexist in a single work as two layers of authorship, with the artist specifying both the source material and the transformation rules. Csuri was working out, in 1967, the collaboration-with-machine logic that every subsequent generation of computer artists would rediscover. Csuri had been a painter and a college football All-American at Ohio State in the 1940s, a career path that makes him unique in this archive. He spent six decades teaching computer art at OSU, trained three generations of graduates, and remained active until his death in 2022 at age 99. Lore Csuri hand-drew the 35,000 source frames of Hummingbird over roughly nine months, working evenings at his OSU studio on the same tracing-paper drafts his animation students were using. The IBM 7094 time was grant-funded by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research; the original proposal had been for computer-aided design research, and the Hummingbird project was a side-channel use of leftover machine time. The microfilm plotter output — tens of thousands of 16mm frames — was photographed onto film in a single marathon run of several days, during which Csuri slept in the computer lab to keep the plotter's paper feed from jamming. The MoMA acquisition in 1969 came because the curator John Szarkowski, who had seen Cybernetic Serendipity at the ICA, personally advocated for it; the film's acquisition paperwork lists Szarkowski as the signatory. Csuri lived long enough to see his 1960s work fully rehabilitated: a 2017 retrospective at the Columbus Museum of Art drew national attention. Sources • Csuri, Charles — "Real-Time Film Animation" (Proc. Fall Joint Computer Conf., 1968). • Museum of Modern Art — Hummingbird (1967) collection entry. • Columbus Museum of Art — Charles Csuri: Beyond Boundaries (exh. cat. 2017).