John Stehura

John Stehura was born in 1943. He studied computer programming at UCLA in 1961, working on IBM systems in UCLA’s Boelter Hall and at Santa Monica College. There he began developing programs for computer music and graphics modeling and later designed a “metalanguage” called Model Eight, intended to integrate music, image, and motion within a unified framework. He also experimented with optical scanners and light-pen systems to give artists more direct control over digital imagery.

Between 1960 and 1965, Stehura created Cibernetik 5.3, one of the first computer-animated films. Programmed in Fortran on an IBM 7094, the project explored the use of artificial intelligence to simulate a filmmaker, allowing the computer to generate most of the imagery autonomously before Stehura refined the final sequence. The film used genetic models and field-based transformations to produce evolving geometric forms and color fields, later combined with Tod Dockstader’s electronic composition Quatermass. Stehura viewed the computer as a creative partner capable of revealing new forms of order through chance and variation, and he used his programs to test how visual systems might behave like living organisms, responsive, self-modifying, and open to indeterminate outcomes. The imagery, plotted on a Stromberg-Carlson 4020 Microfilm Plotter, demonstrated how algorithmic processes could emulate biological growth and perception.

Cibernetik 5.3 has been exhibited internationally for decades and remains a landmark in the history of digital cinema. It was featured in Outer Space at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2016,  Ghosts in the Machine at New Museum, NY 2012, Early Motion Graphics and Visual Music at the Tokyo Museum of Photographic Art, 2021, Color and Form: California Modernist Animation and Abstraction, LACMA, Los Angeles, 2012, and in Digital Infinities: Computer Generated Film & Video, 1952–2023, co-presented by REDCAT and LACMA. Recognized as a pioneering synthesis of computer graphics and artificial intelligence in film, Stehura’s work continues to be referenced in histories of experimental and electronic art, notably in Gene Youngblood’s Expanded Cinema from 1970. Stehura retired to the desert in Southern California.