Charles Csuri was one of the earliest artists to recognise the creative possibilities of the computer. Beginning in the 1960s, years before computer art was established as a field, his experiments with code, animation and three-dimensional form gained international recognition. His work was shown at MoMA, included in the landmark Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition in London and supported by the first National Science Foundation grant awarded to an artist for research in computer graphics.
Yet Csuri did not arrive at the computer as a scientist, but as a painter and sculptor. He had shown his work in New York throughout the 1950s and 60s, moved within the circle surrounding the Cedar Tavern and taught alongside Roy Lichtenstein at The Ohio State University. When he began teaching himself to programme, he brought this artistic background with him - using the computer to explore how drawing, colour and form might behave differently when shaped through code.
In 1967, working with approximately 30,000 punch cards, Csuri transformed his own drawing of a hummingbird into one of the earliest computer-generated character animations. At a time when animation required hundreds of artists to draw individual frames by hand, Hummingbird demonstrated that code could generate movement from a single drawing. The work was shown at MoMA the following year.
Csuri continued working with computers for the next six decades, developing his own software and methods for creating images. He moved from early plotter drawings and animation into colour, texture and increasingly complex three-dimensional forms. The computer was never simply a tool for Csuri, but a space in which new visual languages could be developed.
“ The computer is a doorway into a special universe of possibilities, dreams and tentative realities...”
Charles Csuri (1922 - 2022)
His influence extended far beyond his own practice. At Ohio State, Csuri brought artists, programmers and scientists together at a time when these disciplines rarely met. The pioneering computer graphics programmes he founded helped shape the development of digital animation, and many of the researchers and animators who passed through them went on to work at Pixar, Disney and Industrial Light & Magic.
Ordo brings together a previously unreleased series of works from the Estate of Charles Csuri. Composed of luminous ribbons and sweeping forms suspended in virtual space, the works reflect his enduring interest in movement, colour and three-dimensional form. They appear at once carefully constructed and continually in motion - as though drawing has been released from the page and allowed to move freely through space.
The series belongs to a practice that spanned almost the entire history of computer art. Created by an artist who began working with computers before digital art had a name, these works reveal not only how early Csuri arrived at the medium, but how long he continued to expand its possibilities.
Bio
Charles Csuri (1922–2022) was one of the earliest figures in computer art and animation. He has been described as the “father of digital art and computer animation” (Smithsonian Magazine, 1995; ARTnews, 2022).…