John Whitney Sr. — Catalog

1961

Artists: John Whitney Sr. · Year: 1961 · Medium: 16mm film · Substrate: Repurposed M-5 / M-7 anti-aircraft gun director (WWII surplus mechanical analog computer) · Place: Los Angeles, USA · Institution: Motion Graphics Inc. (his own studio) John Whitney Sr. bought a surplus World War II anti-aircraft gun director — an M-5 or M-7, accounts differ — some time in the late 1950s. The machine was designed to solve a hard real-time ballistics problem: given the speed, heading, and altitude of an approaching bomber, calculate where its flight path would intersect the muzzle of an anti-aircraft gun in three to five seconds' time, and lay the gun accordingly. It was a mechanical analog computer built for killing pilots. Whitney rewired it to drive cameras and artwork stages, and used it instead to make films. Catalog, released in 1961, is a demonstration reel — a short film that showed in sequence what his converted machine could do. Rotating patterns, concentric shapes expanding and collapsing in harmonic intervals, compositions that broke into subcompositions in real time. It is not a narrative, not a documentary, not even an experimental art film in the Brakhage or Deren tradition. It is a technical demonstration of a new kind of image-making, and as a technical demonstration it announced something that had not existed before: motion graphics as a designable medium. The audience mattered. Whitney showed Catalog to the commercial film industry, and the film got him title-design work and technical consultations. His son, John Whitney Jr., took what he learned from his father directly into the slit-scan sequences of 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968. The entire vocabulary of Star Wars title crawls, television station idents, and network broadcast graphics of the 1970s and 1980s — every rotating logo, every expanding ring — descends through the Whitneys from a weapon of war that was supposed to shoot down bombers. That the first serious production system for computational motion graphics was built out of military surplus is not a curiosity of provenance. It is a structural feature of the whole field. The computer, at its origins, was a war machine. Everything computational art has done since has been done on tools whose funding histories run through the Pentagon or its counterparts. Whitney's gun director is the condition of the medium made visible. Lore Whitney bought a surplus WWII anti-aircraft gun director — a multi-axis mechanical analog computer originally designed to calculate the lead for shooting down bombers — and rewired it to move a camera and artwork stages in synchronized motion. 'Catalog' is literally what it sounds like: a demo reel of effects he had coded into the machine, offered as a showcase for film-title work. His son, John Whitney Jr., would later apply this lineage directly to the slit-scan 'Stargate' sequence in Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). A weapon of war became, in the most literal sense, the seed machine of motion graphics. Sources • Youngblood, Gene — Expanded Cinema (Dutton, 1970) • Whitney, John — Digital Harmony (Byte Books, 1980) • Academy Film Archive