Art in the Digital Age:
A Conversation with Anne Morgan Spalter
author of The Computer in the Visual Arts

©1999 by Roxane Gilbert
photo of Anne Morgan Spalter by David Reville

The Computer in the Visual Arts
Buy this book at Amazon.com

Anne Spalter's new book is a seductively articulate and illuminating introduction to the rapidly expanding role of the computer in art, design and animation. Her book will become an essential textbook for art school curricula as well as a standard source for media-wise artists.

Roger Mandle, President, Rhode Island School of Design

While some of us are still arguing about the impact of the computers on visual arts, Anne Morgan Spalter, artist in residence of the Brown University Graphics Group, Department of Computer Science, has written the definitive "How To" book on it. The Computer in the Visual Arts (©1999 Addison Wesley Longman, Inc.) is already being used as a textbook at schools including the Art Institute of Chicago, Pratt Institute and the Fashion Institute of Technology.

Ms. Spalter gave us some thoughtful and thought-provoking answers to our questions about her background, the process of writing her book, and about the advantages and disadvantages of using the computer as tool in the visual arts.

You have a math degree from Brown University and a painting degree from the Rhode Island School of Design. Which came first? How does your career in computer art fit into this picture?

I began as a painting student at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). It's a great school and I loved it there, but in addition to the arts I had begun to really enjoy mathematics. I was taking some courses in the math department at Brown as a side thing, the way that most people take art classes. But after my sophomore year at RISD, I was told that I couldn't take any more math classes because I had already fulfilled my allotted number of "special studies" courses. I spoke with the head of the division of fine arts to see if some exception could be made, but was told "absolutely not -- those are the rules." Someone told me that at Brown there were no distribution requirements and you could cross-register at RISD. I applied to Brown and started there as a junior.

I ended up with three majors at Brown: visual art, mathematics, and an independent concentration (another great thing about the Brown curriculum is the option to design your own major). The independent concentration culminated in a short novel that combined logical, verbal, and visual ways of thinking. When I started writing it, on my manual typewriter. I thought I'd never graduate because I was such a poor typist. I was up one night wondering if White Out came in gallon containers when a friend called to say that he has pressed a "print" button, and while he took a long shower his many-hundred page thesis had neatly printed out. My Grandmother gave me some money and I bought a computer that week (a Mac 128K!).

Although I purchased it as a glorified typewriter, I soon realized that it could help me create images. This was incredibly exciting and I ended up doing the visual part of my novel entirely on the computer. I was still not convinced that the computer was the way to go for artists, though. When I moved to NYC, I continued to use oil paint and sketch. It became harder and harder to do this, though, in the tiny apartment I was living in and in-between the long hours that I was working. (Our apartment had originally been a one-bedroom and previous tenants had divided it so many times that by the time we moved in, it was a three-bedroom apartment. The living room had no windows at all and we found our sofa on the street.) I was working in investment banking, believe it or not (well, it was the 80s...), and I had access to lots of nice computer equipment, including fast machines, graphics programs, and a color printer. I began to make images at work (a click of mouse could bring up an Excel spreadsheet). I could take them home on a disk and work on them there. It was compact and required no volatile spirits.

The experience increased my appreciation of the computer as an artistic platform and made me realize that I should continue my study of art rather than learn more about swaps trading and derivatives. I returned to RISD as a Masters student in painting. The first day in my studio I stretched up a big canvas and went to work. At one point I made a big red mark on it and immediately realized that it was a mistake. In my mind I thought "Undo." Of course nothing happened. The experience made me realize that although the computer lacked the tactile feeling of most traditional media, it had other features that were very powerful. I began to use the computer more and more and today use it almost exclusively in my art.

Your book, The Computer in the Visual Arts, is a comprehensive resource for artists and graphic designers seeking to understand the concepts behind the software. It is now used as a textbook at the Art Institute of Chicago, Pratt Institute and the Fashion Institute of Technology. What other colleges are using it as a teaching reference? Who else should be using it?

I know that classes at Otis College of Art, Purdue University Main Campus, Georgia State University, Long Beach City College and the University Of New Mexico are using it. I'm a little biased, of course, but I think that all computer and design program students should have this book on their shelves. It gives the big picture -- how all the different types of software are related and how the technology has been used in the visual arts over the last 30 years. The book does this in the context of art and art theory instead of separating the technical and artistic. The computer is a technically demanding medium and understanding the concepts makes it a more powerful and expressive tool in the hands of artists and designers. Although it has many textbook elements (exercises, suggested readings, etc.), the book is appropriate for both professional artists and amateurs who are using the computer to create images. Artists and designers who were not trained on computers are especially in need of the type of information in The Computer in the Visual Arts.

Why did you write a textbook rather than a popular market book? Do you have plans to follow up with a book for the popular market?

Aha -- I sort of started on this in the last answer. The whole story is that I was approached by a textbook division of a publishing company (not Addison Wesley) and asked to write the book. I hadn't even thought of writing a book, and I really had no idea what it would entail. I signed a contract before I had even written a table of contents. When I began to work on the project, I realized that I was in way over my head. It took me a year just to figure what I wanted to cover in the book and several more to master the technical portions well enough to be able to explain them clearly. I wrote several drafts for this first company and then one day I arrived at work to find a voice mail message from their editor telling me that they were canceling my contract! I was stunned. They didn't think anyone would adopt the book. It was a very discouraging event and I almost gave up on the whole project. What kept me going was all the artists who had agreed to have their work in the book. There were dozens of people who had not only sent me slides and files, but had spent hours on the phone or over email discussing their work and their views on the field. I thought, I'll never be able to face all these people if I don't publish this damn thing!

I was fortunate to be working for Andy van Dam, one of the authors of the standard reference in the field of computer graphics, Computer Graphics, Principles and Practice (Addison Wesley Longman). He believed in my book and had been helping me work on it. He sent the manuscript to Peter Gordon, a publishing partner at Addison Wesley and he actually took it home and read it. At first they weren't sure if they would do it because the division does computer and engineering books, not art ones. But in the end Peter and his colleagues took a leap of faith (for which I am very grateful) and signed me on. Addison Wesley Longman has been terrific to work with and the whole book-writing process became much more pleasant, even fun, after I signed with them.

So, I had structured it as a textbook for the first company, and then happened to hook up with a textbook division at AWL, so it came out a textbook. If you take out the exercises and readings and remove the numbering of the sections, it becomes much more like a trade press book. I would definitely consider writing a "lite" version that was for a more general audience, but the current book has a depth of content that I think anyone serious abut this field will eventually need.

The computer has indisputably become a highly utilized and indispensable tool for graphic designers. Is there resistance to embracing technology among fine artists and art aficionados? What are some of the problems faced by artists using the computer as a creative tool? What are some of the advantages to artists using the computer as a tool?

There is still strong resistance to the use of the computer in the arts, especially fine art. In the fields of illustration and graphic design, the computer is much more common than in fine artists' studios. As an example, I own a work by Richard Rosenblum, who is an amazing artist. It is the only art work by an at all famous artist I've ever purchased because it's the only one I've been able to afford to. His sculptures probably go for many tens of thousands, but his computer prints are in the $1,000 range. People are afraid they'll fade or that he'll print a zillion of them (actually he limits editions) or maybe galleries are afraid to put too high a price on this untried new medium, especially given the problems with the very non-archival nature of most computer printing. But I think it's a great time to collect computer art. People should rush out and buy this stuff before everyone realizes that it is way undervalued.

Will computers some day take the place of traditional tools in creating art? In a Washington Post article of June 9, 1999, David Ignatius writes of "a gifted computer scientist named Ray Kurzweil (who) has written a new book arguing that over the next 30 years, computers will progress to the point that their intelligence will be indistinguishable from that of a human being." Will computers some day take the place of artists in creating art?

Well, I don't know about his computer, but mine is still incredibly stupid. I just hope that it doesn't crash while I'm in the middle of writing this -- I'm not worried about it's creating art without me. But seriously, I think that the computer will become a basic medium that students will learn, like the pencil, charcoal, the camera. For many designers it already takes the place of traditional tools. I don't think it will displace all traditional media, though, especially in the fine arts. There something about the pleasure of using oil paint or pastels that one just doesn't get on the computer. Right now the computer is a very young medium. History will have to decide whether any great art works have even yet been created with it.

How important are skills in traditional techniques to a computer artist? There are sometimes tradeoffs in the quality of the final deliverable created by graphic designers using computers as compared to those working in traditional crafts. Take for example the typeset of books. Although the computer in the hands of a highly skilled designer can produce beautiful typeset, many designers lack either the training or the time to use their software to its fullest capacity to create what many of the traditional typesetters did so well. There is compensation in the increased speed of production, decreased specialization, and increased economic viability. What tradeoffs might the artist face in creating art on the computer? When is it preferable to use the computer rather than traditional tools?

This is an interesting question because just this evening I had to create a diagram for a presentation. I started off trying to draw it in Photoshop. Even with a cordless, pressure-sensitive stylus, though, I was finding it hard. I switched to Illustrator hoping that more precise-looking and easily editable lines would help. Finally I gave up, drew the thing with a pencil on a small piece of paper and scanned it in. The pencil drawing took about 10 minutes, while the fussing around with the computer programs had already taken a good hour. There are still no really effective programs for easy sketching. This is a research area for computer graphics.

For the actual presentation, though, the computer is essential. And while sketching isn't there yet, other aspects of the computer make things possible that just can't be done with traditional media: working with photographs, for example. The computer lets artists and designers paint with photographs, rearranging the compositions, controlling every bit of the image. This has changed the nature of visual truth and will undoubtedly have a profound and lasting effect on every culture that creates or consumes these images. The 3D world is also a revolutionary area. Three-dimensional graphics software lets artists and designers think rapidly and abstractly in 3D for the first time in history.

Writing The Computer in the Visual Arts was an enormous undertaking. What projects are you working on now?

It was a huge project and one that demanded sacrifices from me and everyone around me. My current demanding multi-year project is named Amelia! She was born in February and takes up pretty much all of my free time (what there was of it). One of the interesting things I am now working on is a research project to make choosing and changing colors in graphics software easier and more enjoyable. But mostly I hope to return to art making in the next few years and put to use all the things I learned while writing the book!!!

Shape Factory
©1997 Anne Morgan Spalter

©1999 Roxane Gilbert
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