Peter Peterson

Describe your field. Why are you interested in Computer Art/ Computer Graphics and what (event, need, idea, hope, obstacle) caused your involvement? Summarize your line of development (the essence of your input to the field) in relation to concurrent technology.

I used to call it "Colormusic" of course referring to music we normally only listen to, here music for the eye. And I cannot see any other way of doing it other than with a computer. However, the only problem right now is that, in terms of work, a personal turning point and the fact that i now have to redefine or rather to clarify also to myself, where do I come from and where do i go, indeed with a whole new form of art, and that obviously it cannot be done with hundred words only and therefore it has to be sent in separately.

Does the computer allow you to think visually about some topic or process in new ways? How has this influenced your work? Describe your ultimate accomplishment.

It does definitely. A question that goes straight to my whole inner core of working, but again, that article I am now working with, as well as, try to cast an eye for example on my latest DVD in addition to many others now on the road, and hopefully you'll see.

Has the field of computer art and graphics progressed in the ways that you expected? What has surprised you? What do you like about its progress and what do you wish had happened differently? What do you think the future holds for visual computing in science/art? Please make some predictions or wish lists for the near- and long-term future.

Progressed? Over the years I have had, and still have so many problems with how to master my own technique, both with a computer but also seen with, we are definitely not aliens or someone being dropped down from outer space. here have been people here before us, and with questions we cannot deny or even more, questions that could make us richer, once we try to relate ourselves to them, and stronger, particularly what future is concerned. Science/art, I think I've answered that question already. And the future, because again that article still on the road, with the good old Renaissance, it was a words invented by people in those days to say that now there was a whole new dimension coming in, and herefore now to use the term, New Renaissance.

Describe your dream environment for enhancing your project ideas. What are your preferred tools for creating and how do they work? What tools (hardware/software) you have used initially had the strongest impact on your work?

I now finally managed, after more than a decade of sometimes even very hard work, I have now come to install my own proper workplace, with almost a dozen different computers together, each of them geared for maybe only one thing to be donem and too bad I cannot bring it with me to show, Max and as well as 3dsDOS, old Animator Pro back from -91, Photoshop and so on and many more. A good medical doctor, where now I am quite capable of putting up the right (technical) diagnosis and then, hopefully, to act accordingly. On the other hand, there IS a problem, namely with the potential outcome. Where for example my fellow colleagues, the musicians and the composers, the always have their thee dimensional, out in the room, whereas I, I am always up on a screen and so up on a wall. And the solution, make or create several screens, up and down, here and there, so that together it may then all come - out!

Describe how you think specific advancements in technology, (such as wireframe, hidden line removal, scanner, laser, HTML, Java applets, or any other advancement), determined the way the approaches to creating art/graphics evolved?

Here I am not particularly bothered.

How would you characterize the milestones (every ten years) in the development of computer technology? Which ones were most influential in art/graphics?

Milestones? Because if you ask me, the one and only, or maybe two, it was when AutoDesk came on the market with first Animator and then Animator Pro, and then shortly after, 3d Studio DOS.

Which persons would you indicate as the pioneers in the particular areas/stages in which decade?

Friedrich Murnau, Viking Eggling, Arne Wilfred and many other already in the early Twenties, then a little later, Charles Blanc-Gatti, Walt Disney, the couple Delaney, Oskar Fishinger, Len Lyle, Norman McLaren, and now finally, from the late Eighties but in a quite different domain Gary Yost.