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The Prix Ars Electronica Archive is a collection enabling search and viewing of all the submissions since 1987. The award-winning projects are documented with catalogue texts and audio-visual media. All other submissions can be searched by title/artist and displayed with year, category in list form. Please cite the credits (artwork name, artist and photographer) and only use the materials if your article is related to Ars Electronica.
Sea-Shore Nest on Procyon II / Reach for Perfection / Music for the Spheres
Melvin L. Prueitt
Original: PR_1987_reachperfection_001_o.jpg | 811 * 621px | 481.0 KB
Original: Reach for Perfection | 4151 * 2723px | 35.9 MB
The Michaelangelo of the Microchip
Masterwork out of the Machine? - Computer is different
For ages, artists have used tools developed for other purposes. Prehistoric people scraped images on rock walls with projectile points and carved bone and wood with cooking tools. Later, sculptors worked with the mundane hammer and chisel. Cameras were not invented to serve as artistic tools, yet photographers raised their craft to the level of art shortly after the camera's introduction. The computer is just the newest artistic tool that was produced for other purposes.
Computers don't create computer art. People create it, using the computer as a tool. The computer relieves some of the tedium of production and allows the artist to devote a larger portion of time and energy to a high level of creativity, much like the way Rodin delegated the execution of some of his designs to his students. Now artists can dream grand visions and then program computers to produce those visions.
Some traditional artists are wary of computer art, seeing it as an interloper in the field of artistic expression. For 19th-century painters, photography was a similar kind of interloper, not deemed worthy of being called an art. But the computer is not a threat to artists. In art, as in its use in science, the computer forms a bridge between logic and creativity.
Masterwork out of the Machine? - Computer is different
For ages, artists have used tools developed for other purposes. Prehistoric people scraped images on rock walls with projectile points and carved bone and wood with cooking tools. Later, sculptors worked with the mundane hammer and chisel. Cameras were not invented to serve as artistic tools, yet photographers raised their craft to the level of art shortly after the camera's introduction. The computer is just the newest artistic tool that was produced for other purposes.
Computers don't create computer art. People create it, using the computer as a tool. The computer relieves some of the tedium of production and allows the artist to devote a larger portion of time and energy to a high level of creativity, much like the way Rodin delegated the execution of some of his designs to his students. Now artists can dream grand visions and then program computers to produce those visions.
Some traditional artists are wary of computer art, seeing it as an interloper in the field of artistic expression. For 19th-century painters, photography was a similar kind of interloper, not deemed worthy of being called an art. But the computer is not a threat to artists. In art, as in its use in science, the computer forms a bridge between logic and creativity.
Born 1932 in Arkansas State, USA. Has various diplomas as physicist. Works for the University of California and is scientist at the National Laboratory Los Alamos/New Mexico. He is mainly interested in computer simulation and computer graphics, which he describes as "lens for the mind's eye". Author of two books about computer graphics ("Computer Graphics", New York, 1975, and "Art and The Computer", New York, 1984). He creates computer graphics for book and magazine covers as well as computer graphic sequences for some award winning films (among them "Star Trek" I, II and III); produces TV-commercials and a computer graphics movie. Furthermore, Melvin Prueitt develops many outstanding computer algorithms in several fields of scientific study and also methods of analyzing scientific data.
Titles of the works presented for Prix Ars Electronica '87:
1 "Sea-Shore Nest on Procyon II", Los Alamos/USA 1987
2 "Reach for Perfection", Los Alamos/USA 1987
3 "Music of The Spheres", Los Alamos/USA 1987
All three were realized on a Cray computer with custom-made software.
Titles of the works presented for Prix Ars Electronica '87:
1 "Sea-Shore Nest on Procyon II", Los Alamos/USA 1987
2 "Reach for Perfection", Los Alamos/USA 1987
3 "Music of The Spheres", Los Alamos/USA 1987
All three were realized on a Cray computer with custom-made software.