John Whitney Sr.

John Whitney Sr. was born in Pasadena, California, in 1917. In the late 1930s, he traveled to Paris to study twelve-tone music with René Leibowitz before returning to the U.S., where he began experimenting with film alongside his brother James. Together, they produced Five Film Exercises between 1940 and 1945, a groundbreaking series that won first prize for sound at the First International Experimental Film Competition in Belgium in 1949. Whitney’s career would continue to merge the worlds of art, sound, and technology, well before such combinations were common. 

Throughout the 1950s and ’60s, Whitney developed new ways of working with motion. He converted WWII anti-aircraft gun directors into mechanical analog computers, pioneering motion-control techniques that laid the groundwork for modern animation and special effects. In 1960, he founded Motion Graphics Inc., using his custom-built systems to produce film titles, advertising sequences, and experimental work. Among his key projects from this period is the animated title sequence for Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, created in collaboration with Saul Bass. He also produced large-scale multi-screen installations, including a seven-screen piece for the 1959 American National Exhibition in Moscow. In 1966, he became IBM’s first artist-in-residence, where he shifted to working with digital computers and expanded the possibilities of computational graphics. In 1968, he produced Experiments in Motion Graphics, an influential film and lecture that outlined his process and philosophy, shaping the path for digital artists to come. His 1975 film Arabesque remains a landmark in computer animation, pairing intricate visual patterns with music in what he called “harmonic progression.” Later, he developed the Whitney-Reed RDTD program, allowing him to compose visuals and sound in real time, a culmination of decades spent merging musical structure with moving image. In 1980 he authored the book Digital Harmony – On the Complementarity of Music and Visual Art, a groundbreaking work that explored the technical and philosophical aspects of software-based visual music. Overall, his work fused the tradition of abstract cinema with the emerging language of computer graphics, expanding visual music into the digital age.

Whitney's films have been exhibited at major institutions worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim, and Centre Pompidou. He continued to push the boundaries of motion graphics until his death in 1995.