Tom Sito
The University of Southern California, USA
Title: Computer Animation at the Half-Century: How Did We Get Here?
Biography
Biography: Tom Sito
Abstract
Fifty years ago a graduate student at MIT completed his thesis project by creating the first ever animation program on a declassified Cold War computer used to track Soviet nukes. In the intervening years Computer Graphics (or CG) has forever changed the way we experience media. Without CG the Titanic would not sink. The armies of Middle Earth could not march. We would never know Shrek, Lara Croft, Buzz Lightyear or the Naavi. It has made movie film itself an anachronism. Yet few today understand its origins. Ask seven professionals what was the first computer graphics in a major motion picture, and you will probably get seven different answers. There is more to the history of CG than one day George Lucas rubbed a lamp and Pixar popped out. Tom Sito, author of the first ever complete history of CG, describes how an unlikely cast of characters—math nerds, experimental artists, beatniks, test pilots, hippies, video gamers and entrepreneurs shared a common dream, to create art with a computer, heretofore considered only a machine for calculations. Together they created something no one asked for, and no one knew they wanted, and they used it to change all the world’s media.