Larry Cuba — Calculated Movements

1985

Artists: Larry Cuba · Year: 1985 · Medium: Computer-animated 16mm film, black-and-white · Substrate: Custom rendering pipeline developed at EVL with team of engineers · Place: Chicago / Los Angeles, USA · Institution: University of Illinois at Chicago (EVL — Electronic Visualization Lab) Larry Cuba was a filmmaker who had trained at CalArts under James Whitney — John Whitney Sr.'s brother, himself a major experimental filmmaker — in the early 1970s. After CalArts, Cuba spent a decade making computer-animated short films in collaboration with engineers and programmers at various research institutions. His best-known work, Calculated Movements (1985), is a six-minute abstract film of geometric forms rotating and interpenetrating in black-and-white, accompanied by a spare electronic score. What Calculated Movements exemplifies is the tradition of abstract computer animation as a distinct aesthetic lineage — one that runs from John Whitney Sr. through James Whitney, through Cuba himself, through the oscilloscope and mechanical-analog pioneers, and onward into early digital computer graphics. Cuba's films do not try to represent anything. They are compositions in pure geometric motion, with the rules of that motion specified in code. Calculated Movements was produced at the Electronic Visualization Lab at the University of Illinois Chicago using a purpose-built rendering pipeline that Cuba developed with a team of engineers. The film took two years to complete. It was acquired by MoMA. Cuba continued making films into the 2000s and has been a vocal advocate for the historical continuity between the Whitney tradition and contemporary real-time generative art. He is still living, in Los Angeles. He maintains an archive of his work online and has been a patient narrator of a history that he is, uniquely, still around to tell. Lore Cuba studied animation at CalArts from 1972 to 1974 under James Whitney. He worked on the Star Wars Death Star trench-run computer-animated targeting-computer sequence in 1976–77, one of the very first commercial applications of real-time abstract computer graphics. He left commercial work to concentrate on experimental short films. Calculated Movements was funded partly by an NEA grant. The University of Illinois Chicago pipeline he developed with engineers for the film was later shared with other researchers at EVL. Sources • Cuba, Larry — personal archive at well.com/user/cuba • Museum of Modern Art — Calculated Movements collection record • Electronic Visualization Lab, UIC — history documents