Yellowtail — Golan Levin's audiovisual performance software

1998

Artists: Golan Levin · Year: 1998 · Medium: Audiovisual performance software — draw with mouse, software converts gestures into simultaneously-generated image and sound · Substrate: Custom software; gestural drawing interface; real-time synthesis of both visual and audio output from the same gestural input · Place: Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA · Institution: MIT Media Lab — John Maeda's ACG Golan Levin's Yellowtail (1998) is a single-window software application built in OpenGL and C++ that allows a user to draw gestural strokes with a mouse or tablet, and then watches those strokes replay indefinitely along their original trajectories, animating themselves as snaking ribbon-lines that interweave and overlap on the screen. The strokes are stored as timed point-sequences; the animation is the playback of those sequences, looping, with each stroke's timing and direction preserved exactly. A user can erase by drawing over, or add layers by simply drawing more. The window is a living drawing that runs until it is closed. Levin was a graduate student at the MIT Media Lab's Aesthetics and Computation Group (ACG) under John Maeda when he wrote Yellowtail. It was his first substantial published work, and it announced what would become Levin's signature method: gestural-input systems that generate ongoing animation from a brief human input. His subsequent software works — Meshy (2000), Audiovisual Environment Suite (2000), Manual Input Workstation (2004 with Zach Lieberman) — extend the 1998 premise in different directions. What makes Yellowtail belong in this archive, beyond its own charm as an artwork, is the specific argument it executes: that the computer is uniquely suited to treating a gesture as a specimen — something captured, studied, replayed, extended, multiplied. A drawing program preserves the result of a gesture. Yellowtail preserves the gesture itself, which is a different thing. What you draw is not the image you see; what you draw is the input that continues to generate the image you see. This move has echoes in almost every subsequent interactive gestural system, from the touch-drawing apps of the iPhone era to the procedural-drawing tools of current generative software. Levin went on to teach at Carnegie Mellon's School of Art, where he founded the Studio for Creative Inquiry in 2009. Yellowtail has been installed, in various hardware configurations, at the Museum of Modern Art, Tate Modern, and Ars Electronica. The original 1998 C++ source has been made public. Lore Levin wrote Yellowtail during his first year at the Media Lab, shortly after arriving from an undergraduate degree at Cornell and a year of technical work at Interval Research. He has said in interviews that the core idea — that a gesture could be played back in time against itself — came to him during a single long night of coding, and that the first working version took about three weeks to polish into a usable installation. John Maeda, who was then running ACG, used Yellowtail in his own lectures as a demonstration of the Media Lab ethos: a single artist-programmer could write a small, coherent piece of software that made a serious aesthetic argument without layers of commercial infrastructure. Levin has continued to run Studio for Creative Inquiry as one of the most generative teaching environments in American art-and-computation, producing several generations of graduate students whose work now populates this archive. He is in his forties and still actively publishing software and writing. Sources • Levin, Golan — "Painterly Interfaces for Audiovisual Performance" (MIT Media Lab MS thesis, 2000). • Flong — https://www.flong.com/ (Levin's archive). • Carnegie Mellon University — Studio for Creative Inquiry.