Bug 3 Frontal

Name: Ragnar Digital, LLC
Price range: $

David Em

1977

C-Print
7.75" x 9.75"

Description

David Em is a trailblazing figure in computer art history whose achievements include making the first navigable virtual world in 1978. Bug 3 Frontal is another milestone: the first 3D character created by an artist.

Em started experimenting with computer graphics in early 1975. Three years earlier, he had left the painting department at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts to pursue more experimental work in California. In 1976, while waiting to start a planned residency at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, he began to spend his nights working on equipment at Information International, Inc., a company which had developed a powerful early system for computer-generated animations.

“After a year or so of hacking away, I finally made some pictures of a candy-colored cricket that could jump, fly, and flap its transparent wings,” Em later recalled. This C-print shows the third iteration of the insect, with articulated body parts allowing it to move within simulated 3D space.