It depends on whether you date the work from the time he began writing it or just living it. It took Alvy Ray Smith 10 years to produce the book. As a participant in this revolution, Smith takes us to the turn of the new century, when we reach the precipice of digital convergence. From that moment, Smith appears as an unforgettable figure in the pixel’s saga, and he brings in the people who shaped him and almost killed him-Steve Jobs, George Lucas, and an obscure would-be animation pioneer named Alex Schure. “Allllllllvyyyyy!” Shankar cries in appreciation. He re-creates a scene where the famed sitar player Ravi Shankar visits Smith’s lab at Lucasfilm and is enchanted by the blooming of an algorithmically generated flower. This history of computer graphics is very much a shadow autobiography, which Smith launches at almost exactly the midpoint of the 560-page volume. “Just the simple idea of separating pixels from display elements is going to seem revolutionary to people who don’t understand the technology,” Robertson says. Once you get this distinction, it’s clear that Digital Light is not a second-class reality. Friends, you are not looking at pixels on your screen but the expression of those pixels.
Smith explains that the pixel is the product of a two-part process in which an element of some consciously created content is presented on some sort of display. Forget your misguided belief that a pixel is one of those tiny squares on your screen. Oh, and the subject of this biography, the pixel, is not what we generally think it is. “It was a term that’s everything I wanted it to be,” he says, covering “all these different aspects of what people do with pixels.” He didn’t coin the term-it was first uttered about a decade ago by a conference organizer who asked him to give a talk with that title. He calls this second reality Digital Light, and it’s pretty much what all of us look at and listen to when we’re not in the middle of a forest. And that is not a metaphorical equivalence. Almost all expression-visual, textual, audio, video, you name it-has moved to the machine world, which, perhaps counterintuitively, is no less real than our physical reality.
Pixel is a deep and challenging tome in the spirit of Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, a winding tale of science, heroes, and tyrants, all leading to the moment, sometime around the beginning of our current century, when a long-predicted digital convergence coalesced. This summer he finally stepped out, publishing A Biography of the Pixel, in which he lays out a grand unified theory of digital expression. Alvy and his colleagues brought all that stuff into the world.”īut the 77-year-old’s mark is not limited to the past, and the world still has to do some catching up to him. “Everything that you currently use in Photoshop right now basically came from Alvy.” Even self-driving cars and augmented reality, “which are all about image processing, machine vision . “As far as history goes, I feel like he got shafted, both in Pixar history and in computer graphics history in general,” says Pam Kerwin, a former Pixar colleague. Yet, despite a healthy ego and a raconteur’s élan, after Lasseter’s callout-and some laughter in the room-Smith stayed in his seat and said nothing.Ĭall it restraint. All while, as Lasseter implied, injecting the ’60s Weltanschauung into everything he touched, much of which touches us still. He’s a unique figure in both computer science and entertainment, bridging the eras of primitive line graphics on blinking oscillators and immersive virtual worlds made of dazzling computer imagery. But Smith’s presence in the back of the auditorium-and not on the stage-spoke to something else: the dissonance between his contributions and his fame.
0 kommentar(er)
