User Guide

Academic Courseware:
Joyce Ryan
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Foreword
In 1972, I got my first taste of “computer art.” My husband John and I
were students at the Rhode Island School of Design. John got involved
in an experiment at the Rhode Island School of Design, and Brown
University had started to encourage art students to collaborate with
computer science students. John was led into a frigid room that housed
gigantic machines that seemed to eat punched cards for fuel. Most of the
artists in the program quickly lost interest. The thought of feeding
punch cards in, one at a time, to plot out a black-and-white drawing
made of alphanumeric characters didn’t seem all that appealing. John,
who was studying Graphic Design at the time and liked anything to do
with turning type into pictures, thought this might have some real
potential. He ended up using all of his allotted time and most of the
other artists’ time as well. In those days it cost several hundred dollars
an hour to use the computers.
Moving forward to the mid 1980’s. I was working with Washington
University to develop a program of study that would introduce artists to
computers. John and I were the only artists they had ever heard of who
had any involvement with computers. I was already going to attend
Siggraph, so I kept an eye out for some software that would meet the
needs of such an academic program. I saw the big 3-D modeling
systems, but was most impressed when I came across the first “paint”
system I’d ever seen. It was by a small company called Time Arts, Inc.
and it used a pressure-sensitive tablet with a special graphics card that
allowed the computer to display 256 colors. Far beyond the punch cards
from college, I could now actually draw and paint with the computer,
and in color! This was the tool I needed to start my program at
Washington University. As excited as I was, that was about how
unimpressed the arts faculty were with the idea of drawing and painting
on a computer. My program got a lot of criticism for being “unnatural”
or superfluous. One or two brave souls came around, but mostly the
faculty could not imagine why anyone would want to try to make art
with a computer.
I threw myself into learning this software inside and out, and was
learning even more by teaching my students. This was the beginning of
the computer graphics program in the art school at Washington
University. The more I learned, the more I wanted to meet the people