John Whitney

To do this we need new tools, and to learn how to control them. They're unlike musical instruments which we have been practicing on for 300 years. We have to start from scratch.

John Whitney was an American animator, composer and inventor, widely considered to be one of the fathers of computer animation. He made his first movies in the late 1930's using 8mm film and an home-made telescope. He experimented making animations with many different techniques including a mechanical analogue computer that he built in the late 1950's by converting the mechanism of a World War II M-5 Antiaircraft Gun Director and in the 1970's he moved to faster digital processes. Check some videos after the fold.

Indeed being myself very interesting in softwares like Processing or Max/Jitter it's amazing to see how important and influencial this work was. Somehow people like John Whitney contributed with these experiments to find a true aesthetics of computing, by constantly questioning and hacking the processes.

"Arabesque" made in 1975 using a digital computer.

 "Catalog" made in 1961 with his analog computer/film camera magic machine he built from a WWII anti-aircraft gun sight.