Calculated Movements by Larry Cuba

Calculated Movements, 1985/2026
Medium: Single-channel digital video (digitized from original 16 mm film, 1985)
Duration: 6:29 min.
Resolution: 1440 x 1080 px
Technology: Zgrass raster graphics system (Datamax UV-1), Larry Cuba's home studio in Santa Cruz, USA
Edition 1 of 5

Artwork

Cuba began working on Calculated Movements in 1982 after acquiring a Datamax UV-1 personal computer, purchased with a grant from the American Film Institute, which finally let him work in his own studio rather than negotiating night shift access to institutional mainframes. The software was custom written in Z-Grass, Tom DeFanti's GRAphics Symbiosis System ported to run on the Z80 chip, a language designed to make computer animation accessible to artists without formal technical training. Working in low resolution raster graphics at animation speed rather than in real time, restricted to four tones of white, black, light grey and dark grey, Cuba generated over two hours of experimental material before the final six minute film was complete after three years of work.

The odd numbered movements each consist of one continuous graphic event spanning the full scene, while the even numbered movements compile forty short events built from four voices cycling on and off at different ratios, so that they beat in and out of phase with one another. The soundtrack was added only after the animation was finished, composed separately by Larry Simon for movements one and three and Craig Harris for movement five, while composer Rand Weatherwax programmed the same cyclical patterns Cuba had used for the visuals into his Emu Emulator II, one of the first studio sampling synthesizers, for movements two and four. As Cuba has said of his practice, "I collaborate with an animation producing robot whose behavior I designed. Over time, the algorithms, the imagery, and the artist coevolve."

Artist

Larry Cuba (b. 1950) is an American artist known for his pioneering work at the dawn of computer animation, beginning in the early 1970s. As a student at the California Institute of the Arts, he taught himself to program in order to create his first film, First Fig (1974), using mainframe access at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. In 1975, he worked as programmer on John Whitney Sr.'s film Arabesque, produced at Information International, Inc. In 1977, Cuba programmed the Death Star trench-run animation for George Lucas's Star Wars, working with Tom DeFanti's GRASS system at the University of Illinois at Chicago; that same engagement produced his second solo film, 3/78 (Objects and Transformations) (1978). His third film, Two Space (1979), was made at Information International, Inc. using the RAP programming language. His fourth and final completed film, Calculated Movements (1985), was made in his home studio in Santa Cruz on the Zgrass graphics system and premiered at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Cuba received fellowship grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the American Film Institute, and was artist-in-residence at the ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe in 1995. His films have been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art (New York), Tate Modern (London), Centre Pompidou (Paris), the National Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.), LACMA (Los Angeles), the Hirshhorn Museum (Washington, D.C.), the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), and the ZKM (Karlsruhe). Calculated Movements was most recently shown in "Electric Op" at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Buffalo, NY, in 2024.