Michael Tolson is the president and one of the founders of Xaos Inc., an animation facility in San Francisco. Prior to his involvement with Xaos, he was a co-founder of another animation facility, Synthetic Video, and worked for many years as a software engineer and consultant. He studied mathematics and physics at the University of Chicago, and painting at the Cooper Union in New York.

All of the segments in 'Wet Science' were produced using a new body of software that I began developing over a year ago and which continues to grow. The impetus to create these tools was twofold: first, to develop the computer generated surface, bringing to it all of the richness and complexity found in natural surfaces and second, to achieve a closer integration of '2D' and '3D' techniques. Whereas the computer world is algorithmic, the natural world, arguably, is not. Thus my objective in working with computers is to create non-algorithmic computer images. I believe that this objective, although paradoxical, is realizable.

Technical Background

HW: Silicon Graphics Workstations
SW: Xaos Proprietary