Twenty years before Scott McCloud’s brilliant insight into digital comics, Reinventing Comics, Bob and Aileen Stein’s The Voyager Company began to explore the territory of ‘interactive comics’ – migrating the page to the screen and using the hypermedia tool Hypercard to add features such as hyperlinked context, interviews, video, indicing, bookmarks and other features entirely new to the general public in 1994 – a couple of years before these became part of the expectation of the media experience after the Web. The best of the current ibook tools (such as Apple’s iBook Author) are only just starting to catch up (in form, and in content-design tools) with what the Voyager creative team did 20 years ago.

In 1906 the industrial designer Peter Behrens was asked to redesign the publicity material for AEG, the giant German electricity supplier – a major national combine incorporating power supply and electrical products. Behrens implemented what was probably the first ‘corporate identity’ programme – the implementation of standardised brand imagery throughout both the AEG product line and all its publicity.

“Thirty-six characters from different stages of life – representations of different times – interact in one room, moving in loops, observed by a static camera. I had to draw and paint about 16.000 cell-mattes, and make several hundred thousand exposures on an optical printer. It took a full seven months, sixteen hours per day, to make the piece. The miracle is that the negative got through the process with only minor damage, and I made less than one hundred mathematical mistakes out of several hundred thousand possibilities. In the final result, there are plenty of flaws ® black lines are visible around humans, jitters caused by the instability of film material resulting from film perforation and elasticity of celluloid, changes of colour caused by the fluctuation in colour temperature of the projector bulb and, inevitably, dirt, grain and scratches.”

– Zbig Rybczynski –Looking to the Future – Imagining the Truth,” in Francois Penz, Maureen Thomas, Cinema& Architecture. Mliús, Mallet-Stevens,

Bilgil produced this 8-minute info-graphic-animation as a graduation piece in 2003. It is a well researched exercise in motion graphics, no doubt inspired somewhat by Marie and Otto Neurath’s Isotypes (1936).

Hockney has always explored new media, experimenting with imaging technologies like the Quantel Paintbox in the 1980s, the i-phone and i-pad drawing and painting apps (e.g. Brushes) more recently. He is also fascinated by Cubism, and has explored some of the ways in which artist’s represent the third dimension using optical tools, like mirrors, camera obscure and camera lucida. The multi-screen videos were made in the Yorkshire Wolds, the subject of many paintings, iPad drawings and video for his grand retrospective ‘A Bigger Picture’ at the Royal Academy in 2012.

Vanderbeek’s early collages and animations were very inspirational and influenced the work of Terry Gilliam, John Stezaker and many other notable artists and directors. Vanderbeek transcended any identification with mono media. He was active in Film, Animation, Music, Archives, Immersive Events, Happenings and much more. Imagine going to College and having John Cage, Buckminster Fuller and Merce Cunningham as your teachers!

Vanderbeek was at Black Mountain College, contemporary with the experimental composer John Cage, the architect-poet-inventor Richard Buckminster Fuller and the dancer-choreographer Merce Cunningham. He experimented with immersive audio-visual environments, animation, computer-generated animation (with Ken Knowlton), he worked with the artist Claes Oldenburg and the the Happenings creator Al Hansen in the late 1950s and inspired by Buckminster Fuller’s domes, create his MovieDome at Stony Point New York in 1963.

“Over the last ten years, I have been working with a variety of media starting with painting and graphics, polarized light, constructions (heatpaintings, collages etc) developing an interest in motion pictures in 1957. I began work in animation, painting, stroke by stroke, animation: frame by frame, computers on and off, and bit by bit, the sequence is inevitable; motion pictures as graphics in motion. I looked on the computer as a challenge.” Stan Vanderbeek March 22nd 1969