Digital Art from back in the day
I was clearing through some bits and pieces at my parents house and I came across this Computer Arts magazine from 1996.
I was beyond excited to make this discovery. I thought the magazine was long lost. I’d created this work back in the early 90’s after returning from an arts residency in Spain. I didn’t have a studio but had a headful of ideas. The art college where I’d previously worked had a new suite of Apple Macs so the Mac room became my new studio. I loved the speed and spontaneity that was possible when working like this. The undo tool subconsciously freed me up to be more explorative and reckless and the work was created freely and spontaneously. It was also about this time that I discovered that I liked making mistakes and that mistakes or happy accidents was what often gave the work it’s energy. It’s a lesson that I often need to remind myself of all these years later when my work becomes a bit tight and careful.
These were created on a really early version of Photoshop (2.5?) but even then the files were often too big to save onto floppy disk (remember them?). Sadly the digital files of the work below and subsequent work have long disappeared - hard drives that failed and no cloud storage back then and a young c’est la vie attitude to the work anyway. I have a few print outs of some of the images below but everything else is gone so it was especially nice to find this magazine - like my time in Spain it feels like a lifetime ago.
