"Creative Computer Graphics" By Annabel Jankel and Rocky Morton Copyright 1984 Bally/Astrocade-Related Excerpt from page 84 of "Creative Computer Graphics." There is artwork created in ZGRASS that accompanies this excerpt. Although the reference to the Astrocade is really through ZGRASS here (and is quite brief, over all), I'm quite to include it. Among the programming languages which have attracted significant interest among artists are Kenneth Knowlton's BEFLIX for mosaics, John Whitney Jr's user program at UCLA and especially the GRASS and ZGRASS languages developed by Tom De Fanti in Chicago. De Fanti has been the most energetic promoter of the use of computer graphics by artists; he turned to an early video games system, the Bally Arcade, to make cheap computer images in the late 1970s. Artists working with him, such as Frank Dietrich, did the same and a community of artists developed in Chicago using the Bally system and a dialect of the BASIC language. Dietrich's and Zsuzsa Molnar's work at first resembled Knowlton's BEFLIX patterns but were extended to other low-resolution styles by S. Wenegersh and others. From there De Fanti advanced to using a computer at Illinois University and his team developed the GRASS system. Images generated by the mainframe are displayed on the screen and filmed with a videocamera. The signal is transmitted to an analogue image processor and displayed again. De Fanti's collegue Don Sandin designed this processor to make real time interactive graphics flexible and accessible on low-cost equipment. The work possible on this system is extremely varied, lending itself to abstract images with woven texture and shimmering ripples of colour. ZGRASS, developed purely for graphics, is based on a simple microprocessor system and an ordinary television display. It is very easy to learn but creates complex images as in Snake 1982 produced by Dietrich and Molnar, who have been collaborating in video, computer and performance art for several years. In 1983 Dietrich abandoned ZGRASS and exhibited Softy 3, a new departure for him in the smoothness of its surfaces and the sense of depth. This was produced on a VAX 11 /750 mainframe with software written in the Fortran language by the artist and David Coons. At the present state of technology it would be unlikely that Snake 1982 and Softy 3 would be produced on the same system. Each combination of hardware and software provides opportunities and constraints, which inevitably means that there are similarities between the creation of different artists on the same system, but in the same way one artist working on different systems will tend to produce different styles using the same artistic vision. Thus Dietrich's work is made less restricting in terms of personal style but more powerfully expansive by the varying media he chooses. However, versatility does not always depend on using different kinds of hardware. Joanne Culver's Frozen Sun Cones is produced using ZGRASS as is Dietrich's Snake 1982 but the two have no obvious visual similarity. Other artists using the same system, such as Copper Giloth, one of the leading exponents of computer art, show a range of creative expression that is entirely her own. One example of the use of ZGRASS is the extremely witty film Nuke the Duke, which uses only simple video game graphics. It was made by Charles Kesler and Jaap Postma of East Carolina University and uses the visual imagery of the amusement arcade. Its subject is the effect of nuclear radiation which may have caused John Wayne ('the Duke') to die of cancer but despite the serious subject, the film has style, zest and engaging humour. If sharing a common computer language is unusual among artists there is nevertheless a common interest in types of presentation such as multiple images, animation, and interactive art, in which the viewer affects some aspects of the work displayed. Interactive art enables the viewer to explore the range of an artist's vision through the ways the pictures can be changed, and also to recognise the formal structure of a piece by noticing what cannot change. With the advent of interactive videodisks, this kind of art need no longer be restricted to galleries, although the resolution on domestic television sets remains a problem for fast-moving detail.