Digital Harmony: The Life of John

Whitney, Computer Animation Pioneer

by William Moritz
Pioneer computer animator John Whitney Sr. in 1959, operating one of the first computer-graphics engines, a mechanical analog computer built
largely from surplus World War II anti-aircraft guidance hardware. The camera is in the upper left, aiming down through the apparatus that
"paints" the film with light. Photo by Charles Eames.

Computers were originally developed as part of the

British and American World War II defense efforts.
They were first known as "Turing Machines" after
Alan Turing who invented them to break Nazi codes -the film of Andrew Hodges' biography was recently
broadcast as Breaking the Code with Derek Jacobi
portraying the inventor. The young John Whitney
worked in the Lockheed Aircraft Factory during the
war and while he was working with high-speed missile
photography, he was technically adept enough to
realize that the targeting elements in such weapons as
bomb sites and anti-aircraft guns calculated
trajectories and produced finely-controlled linear numerical equivalents, which
could potentially be used for plotting graphics or guiding movements in
peacetime artistic endeavors. A decade would pass before he was able to buy
some of these analog computer mechanisms as "war-surplus" and construct with
them his own "cam machine," which pioneered the concept of "motion control."
Animated sequence from Variations.

In the meantime, Whitney had made about two dozen films

in more or less traditional animation. Among these were: in
8mm, a time-lapse of an eclipse and several
drawn Variations, in 16mm two Film Exercises accompanied
by electronic music composed by Whitney with a system of
pendulums he had invented, and about 10 abstract musical
visualizations using an oil-wipe instrument he had also
invented as well as three 35mm cartoons for the UPA
studios. He also did various commercial assignments
including the title design for Hitchcock's feature Vertigo (in
association with Saul Bass), and the preparation (in
association with Charles Eames) of a seven-screen
presentation for the Buckminster Fuller Dome in Moscow.

Motion Graphics
With his computerized motion-control set-up, Whitney could produce a variety
of innovative designs and metamorphoses of text and still images, which proved
very successful in advertising and titling of commercial projects. By 1960
Whitney prepared a sample reel of these and other effects he could produce, and
solicited work for his Motion Graphics, Inc. company. This company kept him so
busy he did not have time to make personal films using the computerized motioncontrol set-up. His sample reel was artfully edited and ended with a lovely final
image of a lissajous curve multiplied dozens of times, to appear twisting in
waves, suggesting the time-lapse of a blossoming flower. The reel was released
as Catalog and became a popular classic of 1960's psychedelica. John Whitney's
younger brother James, who had collaborated with him on the
early Variations and Film Exercises, used John's cam machine to shoot his
fabulous film Lapis. By multiplying the hundreds of dots in his hand-drawn
original artwork into thousands of dots he described the most complex mandalas
writhing with life.
Film Exercise # 4.

Not all of the motion-control effects business

for Whitney's "cam machine" ventures went
in his favor, however. One of the possibilities
demonstrated inCatalog is the slit-scan effect.
Someone else duplicated the effect for the
feature 2001. Ironically, Whitney had
submitted to them a proposal for a monolith
as a computer-generated effect that would have looked different from anything
else in the film. He was turned down.
Whitney had an opportunity to work on the new high-powered digital computers
between 1966 and 1969, when he was awarded a fellowship as artist-in-residence
at IBM. Jack Citron programmed the IBM 360 Digital computers for him. His
first computer generated film is rarely seen, but delightful. Whitney titled the
film Homage to Rameau not only because Rameau wrote the baroque music
heard on the soundtrack, but also to reference Rameau's book Treatise on
Harmony. This text focused the direction of Whitney's aesthetic strivings,
culminating in his 1980 book Digital Harmony.
At approximately the same time that Whitney worked at IBM in California, other
artist-in-residence programs in the East allowed Stan Vanderbeek and Lilian
Schwartz to work with Ken Knowlton at Bell Labs. Vanderbeek's Poem

Fields mainly uses his clever texts as subject matter, and Schwartz's abstract
music films, though colorful and well-paced, seem too similar, hampered by the
limitations of the Beflix program. By contrast, John Whitney's computer films
grew continually more intricate in their exploration of a genuine aesthetic goal:
the establishment of a secure basis for harmonic events in audio-visual
presentation.
Harmonic Progression
In each of John's next five films [Permutations (1968), Osaka 1-23 (1971), Matrix I (1971), Matrix II (1971), Matrix
III (1972), Arabesque (1975)], he demonstrated the principle of "harmonic
progression." For example, in Arabesque (programmed by Larry Cuba), Whitney
experimented with the eccentricities of Islamic architecture, which, though
ultimately harmonic, contain many characteristic reverse curves in its
embellishments. Whitney also made three documentary films on the subject of
digital harmony. In 1979 he completed Experiments in Motion Graphics. His
1973 Hex Demo for a lecture at Cranbrook was included on a laserdisc of his
works issued by Pioneer in 1984.He also completed in 1993 A Personal Search
for the Complementarity of Music and Visual Art which is available through
Pyramid Film and Video.
Left:Whitney's set-up for filming computer animation from a monitor screen, during
an artist residency at IBM Labs.Right:From sequences of Spirals, a piece of "visual music"
created by Whitney on a computer program he designed
in the late 1980s.

In the later 1980s, Whitney

concentrated on developing a
computerized instrument on
which one could compose
visual and musical output
simultaneously in real time. His
first piece on this new instrumentation, which was improved and updated
constantly, appeared as Spiralsin 1987. Although the compositions were linked to
the particular computer set-up, and defied many attempts to copy them onto film
and video, Whitney continued to compose new visual-music pieces until his
death in 1995. The Moon Drum series in 12 sections based on Native American
ceremonial art was most notable. Although less brilliant than the original
computer monitor display, a satisfactory video version of Moon Drum was
released.
John Whitney's active filmmaking career endured over 55 years, and 40 of those
years were devoted to computer work. This is a remarkable record for any

independent filmmaker, but particularly astonishing for the continued quality and
vision of Whitney's films.
William Moritz teaches film and animation history at the California Institute of
the Arts.