Few people have heard of it, yet many consider John Blankenbaker's KENBAK-1 to be the first commercial personal computer.
Pantomation - Video Art The Way It Used To Be
By bohus
I love old video performance gear. The real-time analog nature of the art form still holds exciting possibilities. Pantomation was a system from the 1970's that did some amazing stuff using what today would be considered a rather slow and low res video camera and a PDP computer. Pantomation was able to follow specific colored objects in the visual field using chromakey, then trigger audio and graphical events based on those movements. This is amazing stuff, especially when you see how the tracking system worked in concert with music and video synthesizers of the day.
Today's video game consoles are caught up in the "all new" area of gestural control, but look how capable the Pantomation system was at achieving this sort of effect decades ago. I would love to see more of this kind of kinetic art today using these breakthrough video game technologies. I miss the exuberance of video art pieces like these. Lots of computer based art these days just comes down to being elaborate computer animations. With all these great new real-time performance technologies, maybe we'll catch up with how cool the Pantomation was back in the late 70's!
related:
Wicked DIY analog video synth
Replicating the PDP-8
Today's video game consoles are caught up in the "all new" area of gestural control, but look how capable the Pantomation system was at achieving this sort of effect decades ago. I would love to see more of this kind of kinetic art today using these breakthrough video game technologies. I miss the exuberance of video art pieces like these. Lots of computer based art these days just comes down to being elaborate computer animations. With all these great new real-time performance technologies, maybe we'll catch up with how cool the Pantomation was back in the late 70's!
related:
Wicked DIY analog video synth
Replicating the PDP-8
