David Em at JPL — early computer-graphics landscapes

1977

Artists: David Em · Year: 1977 · Medium: Computer-generated landscape imagery — fractal, 3D-rendered, often alien in affect · Substrate: JPL's custom rendering pipeline (Blinn-era infrastructure); textured sphere rendering; algorithmic surface generation · Place: Pasadena, California, USA · Institution: NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (artist-in-residence) David Em was the first full-time artist-in-residence at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, hired in 1977 by Jim Blinn's computer-graphics group in the JPL Image Processing Laboratory. Em had been a California painter in his twenties and was not, by his own admission, a programmer — he had arrived at JPL through a connection with the graphics researcher Bob Holzman, who had seen Em's paintings and suggested that the new JPL computer-graphics tools might interest him. He was given access to a VAX-11 running a custom 3D-graphics suite that Blinn and his team had built for Voyager-mission previsualization, and told, more or less, to see what he could do with it. What Em made, over the subsequent seven years at JPL, was a body of roughly a hundred computer-generated 3D still images that are — in the consensus of subsequent graphics historians — the earliest fully-realized artistic use of full-color ray-traced 3D rendering. Em's images were landscapes of impossible geometric architectures: nested cubes, reflective spheres, infinite corridors, planetary horizons. The visual vocabulary was, essentially, what commercial 3D graphics would look like a decade later. Em had a half-decade's head start because he was sitting in the lab where the rendering technology was being invented. This matters in this archive for a specific reason that is often elided. JPL's graphics group was developing 3D rendering to visualize spacecraft trajectories and planetary surfaces — scientific visualization was the institutional mission. Em's residency was not scientific visualization; it was artistic work made on scientific-visualization infrastructure. JPL's willingness to support that distinction — to let a painter use the production tools of planetary science to make art — was unusual in 1977 and remains unusual. It produced a body of work that occupies a specific institutional niche: art made inside the engineering culture, on the engineering tools, with the engineering culture's full-throated support. Em left JPL in 1984. His 1977–84 JPL work is the bulk of his career archive. He continued to make computer-generated work on commercial systems through the 1990s and early 2000s but has said, in interviews, that nothing subsequent ever matched the conditions of the JPL residency. The National Air and Space Museum holds the original prints; the Smithsonian digitized a selection in 2015. Em is still living, in his seventies, in Pasadena. Lore Em was the only artist anyone at JPL could remember being formally in residence. The graphics group gave him a desk alongside the engineers. He learned the rendering system by watching Blinn and the other graphics researchers at work and asking questions; he never became a programmer, but he became a fluent user of Blinn's tools at a time when those tools were still being actively developed by their author. Blinn reportedly said that Em's residency was one of the useful parts of his graphics-group tenure because Em's aesthetic demands pushed the rendering code in directions Blinn would not have prioritized for purely scientific-visualization reasons. Several technical innovations in Blinn's rendering system during the late 1970s — improvements in reflection handling, in surface-shading algorithms — came out of Em's image-making requests. The prints themselves were output on JPL's then-new Dicomed color film recorder; many of the 1977–80 originals are on 35mm color transparency film, stored in archival sleeves at the National Air and Space Museum. Sources • Em, David — The Art of David Em: 100 Computer Paintings (Abrams, 1988). • Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum — David Em Computer Graphics Collection. • Blinn, Jim — Jim Blinn's Corner: A Trip Down the Graphics Pipeline (Morgan Kaufmann, 1996; context for the JPL rendering group).