Hummingbird II, 1967
Photo silkscreen on Plexiglas | IBM 1130 and drum plotter | 18” x 30”
Silkscreen print derived from the award winning computer animation. The animation, Hummingbird, received an award at the Fourth International Experimental Film Competition in Brussels, Belgium. Shortly after, The Museum of Modern Art in New York purchased the film for it’s permanent collection as a leading example of early computer animated art.
IBM 7094 drum plotter. This application of a repeated image, becoming another graphical object is seen in Csuri’s work over time.
Hummingbird Film 1967
6mm (black and white, silent) transferred to video | 12 minutes
Charles Csuri’s statement on the film defines the intention behind this revolutionary animation…The film “Hummingbird” anticipates the future, when computers will have the ability to think for themselves. The film begins with empty space and the idea that the computer has intelligence and is capable of drawing a hummingbird—a science fiction notion with its implications for the future. The drawing ensues and a representation of a hummingbird appears at a steady, measured pace before our eyes. An artist's hand does not make the line segments. Instead, some invisible force is in charge, one that eventually fragments the drawing into moving line segments, which become increasingly chaotic and abstracted.
Read more +
Movement is achieved through distortion, much like a child twisting and rotating a paper hummingbird. The child knows it cannot flap its wings, but let's pretend it can. Then the hummingbird gradually collapses into a single line, only to reappear and move in an opposite direction. The computer has a perfect memory and can make exact copies of everything. After several more explorations and variations, the watching intelligence decides "time is up" and slowly erases the hummingbird, returning to empty space.
“Watching the eight sequences of the movie Hummingbird, which was composed of 14,000 pictures, one witnesses how the movements of a simple hand drawing generate an unimagined deep space. The hummingbird dissolves, recomposes, and floats along the imaginary waves” (Beyond Boundaries, pg 42).
Hummingbird is one of the earliest computer-animated films by the artist and programmer Charles Csuri. Aside from creating pioneering computer graphics systems, Csuri is recognized for introducing figuration into the language of computer graphics, which was often seen, even by artists, as a tool for visualizing abstract mathematical formulations. While Hummingbird creates a picture of its titular animal, the hummingbird’s ultimate, abstract annihilation also points to the compatibility between abstraction and figuration allowed by computer animation.
To make the film, over 30,000 individual images generated by a computer were drawn directly on film using a microfilm plotter. Each frame was programmed using one punch card, an example of the complex and labor-intensive operations required by early computer animation. The prelude to Hummingbird provides an overview of the way in which the film was made—a useful primer for much computer-generated art of the time.
In 1968, The Museum of Modern Art organized a program of computer-generated films with programmer Ken Knowlton, who is well known for his work at Bell Labs with filmmakers including Stan VanDerBeek. Presented in conjunction with the exhibition The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age, the film program included Csuri’s Hummingbird alongside films by John Whitney. Not long after its screening, Hummingbird was purchased by the Museum, becoming one of the first computer-generated works to enter MOMA’s collection. (MOMA.org)
