Dan Cooper
When the Apple II personal computer became
available around 1980, before the advent of digital
paint applications, I learned how to create visual
imagery by programming in BASIC.
I wrote my code using mathematical formulas,
always including variables with random numbers
chosen by the processor.
My algorithms would first choose a series of
unpredictable values and assign them to my x,y,z's
and a,b,c's. Then it would plug them into an
equation and draw an image on the white and black
screen. When that was completed, it would loop
back to the top of the program and begin again
repeating the process, with newly chosen variables,
merging visual layers, overwriting and cutting
through the previous content.
If, for example, I was working with ellipses, I could
allow the computer to randomly draw them filled
solid in black or white, or just outlined, or filled with
vertical or horizontal lines. The algorithm would
choose random sizes, positions and orientations. As
the program ran there was often interesting debris
left in the form of isolated pixels or jaggy lines.
Writing a program was not an all-at-once creation. I
would tweak the ranges available for each randomly
chosen variable in response to what I saw on the
screen. I never started with a visual idea, but rather
a mathematical or geometrical one. I asked, "what if
I did this'' I thought of my process as planting a
seed in the processor and letting it grow. When you
plant an acorn, you know you will get an oak tree,
but you don't know exactly what it will look like. I
thought of my algorithms as the DNA of a visual
image, with unpredictable results.
I would watch the screen as the images evolved in
an ever changing picture. When I saw a momentary
composition that spoke to me, I would stop the
program and save the image. It was fascinating, but
not fully satisfying to me as an a fine artist used to
working with physical materials. Most other
computer artists were engineers with an artistic
bent. Their way of making their images tangible was
to take a picture of the computer screen. In contrast
I am an artist with a mathematical bent.
When the first dot-matrix printers became available,
I could finally bring my creative results into the
'real' world. This was a big step, but all I really had
was a low-resolution black and white image on
flimsy printer paper, about two by three inches.
I took my printouts to a blueprint company and had
them enlarged 1000%, (to about 20' x 30') onto
clear film positives. Then, using a photo sensitive
emulsion on the tightly stretched silkscreen fabric, I
was able to transform my computer image into
stencils. This way, I could, squeegee my image onto
a large sheet of heavy watercolor paper, and later,
on canvas.
At this point, I would start to work with colors, and
cut additional screens by hand to coordinate with
the enlarged dot-matrix images. I usually used
colors that blended from side to side or top to
bottom or both.
Later on, I began working on my screens by hand,
alternately painting with a brush and squeegeeing,
creating melded images, with the computer image
maintaining structure which allowed the handwork
to be spontaneous and expressionistic.
Dan Cooper's AutoGallery exhibit