Youngblood analyses the works of 
Jane Veeder who from being a video producer 
has turned into a computer artist. 
Veeder tries to handle computer 
animation in an experimental manner 
- being photographically realistic in 
her works is of little interest for her.
        Gene Youngblood

        COMPUTER ART AS A WAY OF LIFE - JANE VEEDER

        Jane Veeder stands with Ed Emshwiller and Larry Cuba as one of the most gifted computer artists working in America today.
        Relatively unknown until recently, she is beginning to get the recognition she deserves. Her 1982 animation MONTANA is the only work of computer graphics in the Museum of Modern Art's video collection, and her interactive paint program / arcade game WARPITOUT was the sensation of the SIGGRAPH '82 Art Show in Boston.

        Veeder works in ZGRASS a language written by Tom De Fanti exclusively for real-time interactive motion graphics. Incorporating the best features of Pascal, Smalltalk, Lisp and BASIC. ZGRASS is by all accounts the best graphics language around. Among other things, it is self-teaching and user-extensible - the users can create their own commands and integrate these command into the language, expanding and evolving it to fit their personal style of making images.

        ZGRASS runs only on the Datamax UV-1 Graphics Computer which contains three custom chips designed for Bally Arcade games like Wizards of War and Gorf - one chip for processing instructions, one for controlling the display, and one for sound synthesis. This makes ZGRASS faster than anything around at its price (about $ 10,000), and speed is essential for real-time animation. There's also a 16-screen memory that allows you to create and store sixteen different full-screen images and then call them up in a real time animation cycle. Output is standard NTSC video.