The pixel as the organizing principle of all pictures, from cave paintings to Toy Story.
The Great Digital Convergence of all media types into one universal digital medium occurred, with little fanfare, at the recent turn of the millennium. The bit became the universal medium, and the pixel--a particular packaging of bits--conquered the world. Henceforward, nearly every picture in the world would be composed of pixels--cell phone pictures, app interfaces, Mars Rover transmissions, book illustrations, videogames. In A Biography of the Pixel, Pixar cofounder Alvy Ray Smith argues that the pixel is the organizing principle of most modern media, and he presents a few simple but profound ideas that unify the dazzling varieties of digital image making.
Smith's story of the pixel's development begins with Fourier waves, proceeds through Turing machines, and ends with the first digital movies from Pixar, DreamWorks, and Blue Sky. Today, almost all the pictures we encounter are digital--mediated by the pixel and irretrievably separated from their media; museums and kindergartens are two of the last outposts of the analog. Smith explains, engagingly and accessibly, how pictures composed of invisible stuff become visible--that is, how digital pixels convert to analog display elements. Taking the special case of digital movies to represent all of Digital Light (his term for pictures constructed of pixels), and drawing on his decades of work in the field, Smith approaches his subject from multiple angles--art, technology, entertainment, business, and history. A Biography of the Pixel is essential reading for anyone who has watched a video on a cell phone, played a videogame, or seen a movie.
Author(s): Alvy Ray Smith
Edition: 1
Publisher: The MIT Press
Year: 2021
Language: English
Pages: 560
Tags: biography, pixel, pixar
Contents
Series Foreword
Beginnings: A Signal Event
Foundations: Three Great Ideas
Contributions: Two High Technologies
The Rise and Shine of Digital Light
How to Talk about High Technology
Foundations: Three Great Ideas
1 Fourier’s Frequencies: The Music of the World
It’s All Music
A Lust for Immortality
The Wave
Sound
Napoleon Bonaparte
Fourier Meets Bonaparte
Vision
Rosetta Stone
Corrugations and Furrows
A Need for Heat
Dancing with Tyrants
Joseph and Sophie
Becoming Immortal
The Nature of Genius
2 Kotelnikov’s Samples: Something from Nothing
The Spreader
Pedigree, Papers, and Positions
Digital and Analog Infinities
The Pixel
Name Games
Spread and Add
Pixels Are NOT Square
The Great Terror and Its Tyrants
How Digital Light Works
Spies and Scramblers
Getting Digital Representation Right
Spearheading the Space Race
Getting Rid of High Frequencies
Dancing around Tyrants
Parallels and Ironies
3 Turing’s Computations: Eleventy-Eleven Skydillion
St. Turing
Malleability
Amplification
Take or Make, Shoot or Compute
He’s Got Algorithm
The eProblem
Not a Toy
Johnny von Neumann
Bletchley Park
Max Newman
The Vocoder Connection
Unknowability
Programming
Myths about Computers
Tying It All Together
Off to the Races
Contributions: Two High Technologies
4 Dawn of Digital Light: The Quickening
Predawn: The Yanks versus the Brits
The Dawning of the Light—and Computers
Forbidden Fruit
The Race
Architecture versus Design
The Brits
The Yanks
Digital Light
5 Movies and Animation: Sampling Time
Weird Eadweard
Defining a Movie
Why Do Movies Work?
A Flow Chart of Early Cinema Systems
The Yanks
The Franks
The Edison Trust and the Creation of Hollywood
Animated Movies: Unhinged from Time
Tower versus Stinks Revisited
The Rise and Shine of Digital Light
6 Shapes of Things to Come
The Spline Shape
A Plump of Ducks, a Pod of Whales
Computer Graphics Defined
The Triangle Shape
Flow Chart of Early Computer Graphics (Cont.)
An Important Distinction: Objects versus Pictures
The Milieu
The Age of Digital Dinosaurs
What Do We Mean by Real Time—or by Interactive?
The Received History of Computer Graphics
Coons and Bézier
The Forgotten History of Computer Graphics: The Triumvirate
The Central Dogma of Computer Graphics
What Exactly Did Ivan Do?
Cybernetic Serendipity: Artists Discover Nascent Computer Animation
The Moore’s Law Speedup: Amplification Goes Supernova
Sutherland Again: The Birth of Virtual Reality
Digital Light: From Shapes to Shades
7 Shades of Meaning
Moore’s Law 1X (1965–1970)
Moore’s Law 10X (1970–1975)
Moore’s Law 100X (1975–1980)
8 The Millennium and The Movie
Moore’s Law 1,000X (1980–1985)
Moore’s Law 10,000X–10,000,000X (1985–2000)
Taking Stock
About Explanation
Finale: The Great Digital Convergence
The Separation of Picture from Display
The Pixel as Fundamental Particle of Digital Pictures
Computation as a Principal Source of Digital Light
Varieties of Digital Light Experience
The Idea–Chaos–Tyrant Triad
Two High Technologies and the Received-History-Is-Wrong Motif
Idea–Chaos–Tyrant Triads in Two Contributing High Technologies
The Rise and Shine of Digital Light
The Central Dogma
And Beyond
A Summation . . .
. . . and Beyond Beyond
Parting Shot: A Magic Carpet
Acknowledgments
Extraordinary Thanks
Special Thanks
In Memoriam to Those Who Helped Me but Didn’t Survive to See the Book
Content Providers, Historians, Readers, Advisers, and Other Help and Hosting (not Already Listed)
Archives and Archivists
Software
Prior Appearances of Selected Text and Figures
Notes
Beginnings
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Finale
Image Credits
Beginnings: A Signal Event
1 Fourier’s Frequencies: The Music of the World
2 Kotelnikov’s Samples: Something from Nothing
3 Turing’s Computations: Eleventy-Eleven Skydillion
4 Dawn of Digital Light: The Quickening
5 Movies and Animation: Sampling Time
6 Shapes of Things to Come
7 Shades of Meaning
8 The Millennium and The Movie
Finale: The Great Digital Convergence
Index
