Charles Csuri (American, 1922-2022) was a pioneer of computer art, producing early computer-generated drawings, animated films, and computer-milled sculptures in the United States.,Trained as a painter, he spent his career building the software and hardware tools that let him translate texture, motion, and form into code.,
Born in Grant Town, West Virginia, to Hungarian immigrant parents, Csuri won a football scholarship to The Ohio State University, where he became an All-American and captain of its first national championship team.He served in World War II and received the Bronze Star for heroism at the Battle of the Bulge, where he ran through open ground under machine-gun fire to restore his unit's lost communications.After the war he turned down an offer to play in the NFL and instead completed his art education at Ohio State, earning an MFA alongside his close friend Roy Lichtenstein.In 1963 he saw a grayscale image made by computer and decided to pursue art by machine, later calling the computer his “magic black box of surprises”.,
At Ohio State he became the first artist to receive a grant from the National Science Foundation in 1969, funding that led to the Computer Graphics Research Group and the Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design, and he later co-founded the Ohio Supercomputer Center. He also founded Cranston Csuri Productions in 1984, one of the earliest computer animation companies, and mentored more than 40 PhD students who went on to work at studios including Pixar, Disney, and Industrial Light & Magic.His 1967 self-portrait Sine Curve Man is considered the first figurative computer drawing made in the United States.,That same year, Random War generated battle scenarios from a drawing of a toy soldier fed into a random number generator, and has been read as an overtly political work about war.,The film Hummingbird, made in 1967,entered the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in 1968.In Cosmic Matter, from 1989, he wrapped heavy impasto oil paint onto three-dimensional forms and used an embossing technique that predated the image-processing tools later built into Photoshop.
Csuri exhibited at “Cybernetic Serendipity” at London's Institute of Contemporary Arts and “The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age” at MoMA, both in 1968, and later took part in the 42nd Venice Biennale.In his final years he minted the NFT Face of Change, which was auctioned at Sotheby's, before his death in 2022.
