Oh Thank you for watching.

I may well have been the first artist to get involved in computer graphics as an art form.

It was not easy to become involved.

Charles Surrey began experimenting with computer technology in 1964.

His 22-year career in computer graphics and animation has brought him international recognition and acclaim.

Today, he is recognized as a pioneer in his field.

I taught at Ohio State probably for about 17 or 18 years, but I was a full professor before I got involved with the computer.

Now, this is an important point because you can't imagine what it was like in 1965 and as an artist to be involved with computers.

When you are doing something for the first time, people simply don't understand and they are very irritated by it for a very, very long time.

Not much has changed in 30 years.

I hope that he sees himself become recognized for what he's done in art, for being the pioneer that he is.

He's already very recognized in Japan.

He talks about getting off the airport in Japan and people run up and want to shake his hand and have the husband take a picture of Chuck standing with the wife and whatnot, whereas he's had most of his work at Ohio State and he can walk across Ohio state across the oval.

And nobody knows who he is.

And to me, that's amazing.

Charles Suri is now retired from teaching and works on his art every day at the Advanced Computing Center at The Ohio State University.

I come in very early in the morning and I literally spend the entire day working on the computer.

I'm working in a conceptual three-dimensional space.

I have a personal point of view about how I work with color, how I view objects, which has been influenced by the way I can manipulate objects in three- dimensional space.

And I work highly interactively with the computer.

I get visual feedback.

And then, eventually, I decide that I have an image.

And I see myself very much like a sculptor working with the clay model, and I'm able to move arms and legs at the same time, rotate the pedestal and looking at the thing from different angles, from many different points of view.

But I'm much more fascinated now by the idea of...

Setting up some limitations to how a figure can be posed and then let the computer decide what poses to make and give me back a thousand different poses and then I can say I really like pose number 256 and and play some games where I exploit the capabilities of the computer and not simply limit myself to always trying to predetermine what it is I want to do.

Recently, Charles has been printing his computer images onto 48 by 64 inch Seba Chrome photographic paper.

I call what I'm doing computer imagery, computer images.

And there is no convenient label for them.

I guess that's why people call them photographs.

But I prefer computer images, because they're not photographs.

There are two notions that interest me greatly.

One is the idea of color as a three-dimensional space and color as light, and the relationship between the color of the object and the so-called space itself.

And you see a relationship here and a relationship there.

And the other notion is the instancing or the ability to show different views of the same object, because these objects are in a three-dimensional space.

The difference in my mind between Chuck and most of the people doing what they're portraying as computer art, I guess it is computer art is that Chuck is an artist first, his background is in art and he was an instructor in art, and he did the oil behind me 30 years ago and did a lot of sculpture in the pop art period and picked up the computer as a tool.

And so he's rather than...

Being somebody who's a computer technician first, he's an artist who's using the computer to create the image that he has in his head.

Computer animation today is driven very strongly by commercial interests and the kind of qualities that people get have a kind of sterile look to them.

I think I have some ideas about how to do that differently.

I'm interested in doing animation that looks like crud, that looks dirt, but is moving in three dimensions.

I want to do things.

That don't look quite so sterile.

I think in my work, I'm interested in trying to convey some qualities that have universal meaning.

And I'm not something that maybe transcends cultures.

At least, I hope that I might be able to do something like that.