David Em

David Em was born in Los Angeles in 1952. When he was a year old the family moved to South America, where he spent his childhood in Colombia, Venezuela, and Argentina before returning to the United States as a teenager. In Connecticut he developed an early interest in art, taking evening life-drawing classes at the Silvermine Guild and spending weekends visiting museums in New York. He studied painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, later attending the American Film Institute in Los Angeles to study film directing. In the early 1970s he worked with industrial plastics and video systems before turning to computers, setting up his first studio in San Francisco in 1972.

Em began working with electronic media in the early 1970s, first experimenting with television sets and image-processing systems before creating his first digital picture at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in 1975 using SuperPaint. In 1976 he produced one of the earliest articulated 3D characters, a computer-generated insect, at Information International Incorporated in Los Angeles. That same year he became artist-in-residence at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory(JPL)  in Pasadena, where he worked until 1988 and also held an affiliation with Caltech. At JPL he used advanced scientific imaging programs, including those developed by computer graphics researcher Jim Blinn, to construct some of the first navigable virtual worlds. Works such as Aku from 1977, Approach from 1979, established him as a leading figure in early digital imaging. In the 1980s he expanded the painterly qualities of computer graphics, incorporating glitches and unexpected program behavior into complex textures and atmospheric effects, and later introduced otherworldly life forms into his images. After the JPL Graphics Lab closed in 1988 he continued his work independently, and in 1991 spent a season at Apple’s Advanced Technology Group experimenting with early commercial software such as Photoshop. By the mid-1990s he had built a personal studio equipped with desktop systems, where he explored the expressive potential of commercial software and personal computers, and later developed projects that referenced neuroscience and visual perception. In the 1990s he explored the possibilities of commercial software and personal computers, and later developed projects that referenced neuroscience and visual perception. He has also worked with artificial intelligence, applying it as another imaging tool within the same systems-based approach that has guided his work since the 1970s.

His work was first exhibited in solo shows in California at the end of the 1970s and early 1980s, including Art for the 80s at the Colorado Street Gallery in Pasadena and a presentation at Silverworks Gallery in Los Angeles. His image Transjovian Pipeline, created in 1979, became one of the most widely reproduced digital artworks of the decade, appearing in books and magazines around the world. As his reputation grew, his work was included in international exhibitions at venues such as the Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie in Arles, Photokina in Cologne, and the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. In 1983 Harvard’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts mounted The Artist in the Lab, and by the mid-1980s his images were circulating internationally at the Spanish Museum of Contemporary Art in Madrid, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the Bronx Museum of the Arts in New York. His work also reached popular audiences through the covers of Herbie Hancock’s albums Future Shock, Sound-System, and Perfect Machine. His career was the subject of The Art of David Em, published in 1988 by Harry N. Abrams with an introduction by David Ross, Director of the Whitney Museum of American Art. The Smithsonian Archives of American Art later became the first institution to acquire the working papers of a digital artist.