00100		The fact that I'm living in Silicon Valley, the high tech 
00200	capital of the U.S.A. and the center of much computer production and
00300	research in artificial intelligence, has a    to do with my 
00400	experimenting with computerized prints.  In 1971 I was a painter and
00500	printmaker, with an emphasis in etching.  My husband, a composer and
00600	professor of music at Stanford University, started working 
00700	enthusiastically at Stanford's advanced Artificial Intelligence 
00800	Laboratory on the then new PDP10 computer, developing musical programs
00900	for sound production and graphic programs for the printing of musical
01000	scores.  At this time it seems everyone in Palo Alto was "playing" with
01100	computers, including everyone in my family.  It was great fun -- and the
01200	Stanford A.I. Lab, set in beautiful oak-studded hills covered with grazing 
01300	horses and cattle, was a kind of bucolic paradise, providing a loose
01400	California-type ambiance that visitors from all over the world have come
01500	to appreciate.  Out of the "playing with the computer," utilizing light
01600	pen techniques, as well as computer-directed video camera work, I produced
01700	my first "computer graphics."  The Calcomp plotter, loaded with various
01800	colored felt pens, drew out the images dictated by edge-finding programs.
01900	By offsetting the images slightly, and changing the number coding, I 
02000	could produce a sort of counterpoint of "drawings" which had intriguing
02100	compositions but which, in the long run, looked like computer print-outs,
02200	on unattractive paper and in colors that faded after a couple of years.
02300	From the beginning, however, I wanted to incorporate the computer work
02400	into my own way of seeing, into my own, developed, aesthetic style -- 
02500	rather than to utilize the geometric potential or the random number
02600	capability of the computer.  It became a tool that enabled me to enlarge
02700	on my established style.  One of the first prints, for example, called
02800	San Damiano Mix, was exhibited in a solo show at Jason-Aver Gallery,
02900	San Francisco, in 1971.  It was part of a series of works leading up
03000	to an eight foot by eleven foot cut-out triptych painting on St. Francis
03100	of Assisi (an ecological statement).  "San Damiano" refers to the small
03200	town near Assisi where St. Francis received his first vision.  What a
03300	far cry from the minimilized subjects of most computer art!
03400	 
03500		I've never had available a flat-bed plotter, which would enable
03600	me to go directly from the terminal to the finished fine print, so I was
03700	forced to add the step of contact photography to the opaque print-out.
03800	I produced a kodalith film which I then exposed on a photo-sensitive
03900	zinc plate.
04000	
04100		I hit a lot of technical dead-ends at first.  Then, in 1975, I
04200	produced the VENUS etching.  This was part of a series interpreting the
04300	history of women's images, as presented by some of the great artists,
04400	images that have molded our thinking about Women -- from the Willendorff
04500	Venus through Botticelli, Titian, Goya, Picasso, and De Kooning.  The
04600	poem I wrote in 1974 was a playful accompaniment.  The series, MY feminist
04700	expression, included a number of watercolors, pastels, two conventional
04800	etchings, and a five by eight foot cut-out painting as its culmination.
04900	I fed the computer-directed video camera one of the conventionalized
05000	etchings (thus cannibalizing my own work).  I also presented special
05100	conte crayon drawings to the camera, to be processed by an edge-finding
05200	program.  I typed in the poem and picked a type font from the type setting
05300	program newly developed at the Artificial Intelligence Lab.  Then I 
05400	programmed the computer to disperse and turn the images and text by
05500	arithmetically changing point locations on an X-Y axis.  The T.V. camera
05600	conveyed the dark-light pattern usually seen on a T.V. screen to the
05700	computer memory.  The programs found the edges of real or illusional
05800	objects and sorted out levels of contrast that could be interpreted as
05900	edges.  Demarkation of maximum contrast created a firm line.  Demarkation
06000	of less value contrast created more fragile, broken, lines.  Some of the
06100	programs were first developed by NASA to ascertain the depth of moon
06200	craters from photographic value contrasts.  The output of the programs
06300	was stored as hundreds of individual short line segments which were
06400	produced as line drawing by the computer-operated plotter.  Line and
06500	etching were a natural pair -- and historically so.  As visual data
06600	were expressed in numbers, changes or "distortions" of the image could
06700	be effected by applying multiplying, dividing, adding, or subtracting
06800	factors to the numbers.  Novel transformations were achieved: the image
06900	could be curved in ways never before visualized; turned inside out;
07000	serialized; compressed to one point and reversed; fattened; thinned; etc.
07100	
07200		I decided my VENUS etching was interesting, but a bit rigid, so
07300	I developed a second soft-ground plate to print in registration.  It
07400	echoes some of the purely linear women and gives them color variety.
07500	
07600		The gradual serial distortion produced by changing the number
07700	suggested to me a more extended metamorphosis of forms.  the next two
07800	computerized etchings, finished in 1977, L'ISOLEMENT, had their genesis
07900	in a strange way -- and that's significant, because they are haunting,
08000	perhaps frightening, and strange.  I was teaching a drawing class for
08100	Foothill College, but this class, in the heyday of college enrollments,
08200	was given off the campus, in a Junior High School science room.  I'd
08300	hired a male life model for the class to draw.  As they drew him from the
08400	front, I drew him from behind and THROUGH the classroom's full-skeleton.
08500	His pose was accidentally like that of Adam in Michelangelo's Sistine
08600	Chapel mural, with the tentatively reaching hand.  Later I made 
08700	fourteen freshly executed sumi drawings on long scrolls, rarifying them
08800	into the images finally chosen for the computerized etchings -- and the
08900	poem, written in French, and presenting the feelings of the isolation
09000	of male and female.  Man is subject to the laws of Nature -- to Creation
09100	but also to Death -- and without Woman he is lost in a kind of arrogance.
09200	the skeletal image juxtaposed to the accidental Michelangelo pose was
09300	very touching. It reminded me that even in birth the concept of Memento
09400	Mori haunts us.  These two etchings were exhibited in Brussels in 1978
09500	-- where even the poem passed muster.
09600	
09700		Using similar techniques, I developed the two etchings, SINGLE
09800	FIGURE SERIAL PRINTOUT WITH POEM and DOUBLE FIGURE SERIAL PRINTOUT
09900	WITH POEM.  One important aspect of this work was portraiture -- and in 
10000	a medium I've tried to revive among my students, mezzotint.  This is a
10100	painstaking hand process, rocking with a rocker and scraping with a
10200	scraper on a copper plate.  Working in the Atelier de Gravure 
10300	Calevaert-Brun in Paris during parts of 1974, 1975, 1978, and 1979, I
10400	produced four finished mezzotints.  Subjects: the people, hardware, and
10500	software of the Stanford A.I. Lab -- robots moving on T.V. screens --
10600	the now-renowned robot arms and hands selecting and piling blocks --
10700	computer-directed carts cavorting around the picturesque landscape.
10800	Cannibalizing my mezzotints, I photographed them, applied a mezzotint
10900	screen, and used them as a basis for these serialized portrait prints.
11000	the registered color plate, in each instance, is a monotype.  The young
11100	man manipulating the robot images is my son.  The poem was written in
11200	1978.  It attempts to capture the feeling of this special place.
11300	
11400		In 1979 and 1980 I finished three computer-assisted etchings
11500	using black and white photographs of the A.I. hardware I'd taken over
11600	the years -- hardware that was now becoming obsolete.  The PDP6
11700	computer is now headed for a computer historical museum at M.I.T.  The
11800	DEC PDP10 gave way to the PDP11 -- and the PDP11 to the new Foonly F2,
11900	designed and built by alumni of the A.I. Lab.  Film-collage techniques
12000	and overlays are important aspects of these etchings.
12100	
12200		My most recent computer-assisted etchings combine a 1978 poem,
12300	ANCIENT CITIES, with digitized images from Yucatan and Paris.  They
12400	are based on very spontaneous, on-the-spot drawings of these locales.
12500	I'm fascinated by the mood of PLACE.  Architecture is a voice of man;
12600	it house man, but survives him.  In 1978 I lived for a few weeks among
12700	the Mayan ruins; in 1979 I lived for three months in one room on the
12800	rue de Venise, 1/2 block from the Centre Pompidou, with its continuous
12900	circus on the Square St. Martin.  I spent hours underground at the IRCAM
13000	computer center xeroxing on acetate the drawings I'd made perched on the
13100	roof.  Xerox on acetate functions on photo sensitive etching plates the
13200	same way any transparent film does.  Both Kokoshka and Derain have done
13300	electrifying landscapes in which birds in flight have "fractured" the
13400	accepted sense of what the architecture of the picture should be -- not
13500	just decorative birds going on their way but birds suggesting man's
13600	spiritual state in his environment.  By the juxtaposition of the bird,
13700	the Mayan architecture (reduced to minimal pattern), and the modern
13800	architecture of the Centre Pompidou (also minimilized for barest
13900	recognition), I've hoped to provide a foil for my word-play about how
14000	Time, as we measure it, is a tool of our egos; without our egos, it
14100	could be seen as a non-linear dimension.
14200	
14300		Perhaps the new computer technologies will enable us to 
14400	achieve new aesthetic visions.  I certainly hope so.  I'm encouraged
14500	by the broadmindedness of the people working in the advanced research
14600	centers of the Santa Clara Valley and by the increasing availability
14700	of low cost equipment.  My work, which is just a small tapping of the
14800	potential, shows that the computer can be harnessed to lyrical ideas
14900	and can be part of traditional, refined, print mediums.
15000	
15100	
15200	
15300						Edith Smith
15400						June 12, 1980