The Artists
Short portraits of the figures whose work stands behind the course — experimental film, video art, visual music, and the founding moments of computer animation. Most of them are people whose names appear in the lineage row on the front page; these pages are where those names open into context.
Artist pages are living documents. New ones arrive as the course returns to them. Tell me who should be here who isn't.
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Jules Engel
1909–2003. The through-line. Disney & UPA veteran, founding director of Experimental Animation at CalArts, and the mentor who told Beckett, Priestley, and the rest to confuse him, follow the glitches, and fall on their faces.
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Ed Emshwiller
1925–1990. Video as an electronic vocabulary, bodies in synthetic space, and the cube that became a world. Scape-Mates (1972), Sunstone (1979), and the founding of the Computer Animation Lab at CalArts.
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Pat O'Neill
b. 1939. Optical-printer compositing as the precursor to digital layer-and-node thinking. Water and Power (1989), founding faculty at CalArts School of Film/Video, and the printer room as research site.
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Adam Beckett
1950–1979. Turning the optical printer from a post-production tool into a primary image-making machine — simple drawn loops compounded through hundreds of passes into cosmic abstractions. First CalArts experimental animation cohort; later at ILM on Star Wars.
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John Lasseter
b. 1957. Second student in the first Character Animation cohort at CalArts; his senior thesis Lady and the Lamp (1979) encoded the ideas about objects-as-characters that later became Luxo Jr., Toy Story, and the early Pixar aesthetic.
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Joanna Priestley
The first computer-animated film made at CalArts (Jade Leaf, 1985), a balky Cubicomp filmed off the CRT with a 16mm Bolex, and Jules Engel's instruction to follow the glitches rather than fix them.