Robert Mallary, Visiting Artist Lecture 1972

Robert Mallary gives a lecture at Skowhegan talking about his interest in art and technology. Mallary shares his fascination with materials, specifically polyester resin, and discusses how historic materials can be thought about in combination with new media, like computers, to create images. He specifically mentions the CRT display. Mallary is curious about new sculptural media, new methods of 3D projection, and man-machine interactive systems. Mallary believes that the human being waking up with the computer system can learn to do various things. He gives an example of a new drawing method: he creates groups of drawings made by the computer along with contour renderings of three dimensional forms. These generate an interference pattern he has been using to develop his sculptural practice. Mallary tells the students that once they have data in a machine, that data can rapidly create endless variations. He also describes and is interested in the computer as also a tool to generate half tone images. Mallary shares how the computer allows him to calculate what the light and shadow can be for a given form, and how images can now be generated by the CRT display. Mallary ends his lecture by discussing his interest in computer-generated holograms, and encourages the students to explore programming and computer art in their practice.