Series on Early Computer Graphics at the Museum of the Moving Image this Weekend

Now that electronics control our lives, the Museum of the Moving Image will present a three-day series about films from the Good Old Days, when science fiction trumped computer science. Seven sessions will feature everything from screenings of computer-assisted psychedelia to formative digital advertising to music videos. Plus, some of the first filmmakers to utilize the computer, Larry Cuba, Lillian Schwartz and Dean Winkler, will participate in conversations about their works.

• November 15th, 7 pm: Demon Seed (below), a post-humanist thriller starring supercomputer Proteus IV, which can cure leukemia, develop mining techniques, and ruminate on Buddhism. When threatened with a data-wipe, the machine infiltrates the high-tech home of a scientist, trapping his wife to impregnate her with his synthetic spermatozoa.
• November 16th, 2 pm: shorts and live event showcasing works by motion graphics pioneer John Whitney, who did the opening titles in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo in 1958, his son John Whitney Jr. and Larry Cuba, who will be on hand.
• November 16th, 3:30 pm: shorts from the 1950’s and 1960s, including Norman McLaren and Evelyn Lambert’s oscilloscope film Around is Around, Pierre Hébert’s Around Perception and  John Stehura’s Cibernetik 5.3.
• November 16th, 5 pm: films and talk with computer artist Lillian Schwartz about her early experiments at Bell Labs and her contemporary digital explorations.
• November 16th, 7 pm: Tron (above), a groundbreaking feature about computer programmer Kevin Flynn who is scanned and transported into an autocratic universe of zipping vectors and shiny surfaces, somewhere inside of the mainframe of an arcade game.
• November 17th, 2 pm: shorts from the 1970s and 1980s, when computer-generated imagery entered its adolescence with single-channel works and music videos. After the program Tom Sito will sign copies of his new book Moving Innovation: A History of Computer Animation.
• November 17th, 5 pm: The Last Starfighter, a film about trailer-park-teen Alex Rogan who lands a job with the Rylan Star League due to his superior arcade-game prowess. Rogan must defend the universe from the tyrannical Xur and his armada of evil Kodans.

Top photo: Disney; Bottom photo: Museum of Moving Image