Robert Abel and Associates

AND Communicaitons

"Guernica" projects

The dawn of Form and Function... {our first paying gig}

In the late 80's computer graphics pioneer Robert Abel and Allen DeBevois roamed the planet seeking interesting examples of this budding new notion called "interactive media." Bob opened interesting R&D doors because of the seminal influences he had establishing computer generated eye-candy for Hollywood. Winner of numerous Clio awards and a true journeyman of computer graphics he lead many of the teams that would forge dramatic new ways to image ideas and present them to the public. His crew and technology would disperse to catalyze PIXAR, Alias-Maya {Wavefront}, Rythm & Hughs, and a myriad other digital spawning grounds. You can blame him for every overly animated super-shiny chrome corporate logo you see.

Guernica project as explained by Bob Abel for Douglas Adams' HyperLandThere is an excellent BBC production featuring Douglas Adams' guiding the audience through the early notions of what a webbed-up world of tomorrow today, will probably look like. It's called HyperLand and about 25 minutes into this {mp4 file} you see Bob Abel explain the Guernica Project when he was at his peak and makes a rather nice time-capsule.

 

Home, where the art is To Top of PagePreliminary

This project became a reasonable first-pass at Alan Kays' DynaBook notions - which had inspired all of us on the team in various ways.

Guernica - pronounced "Gware-nee-kah" - was first real interactive hypertext project beyond corporation research and white papers and tackled the emotional issue of pre-WWII fascist massacre in Guernica, Spain immortalized by Picasso in a huge black and white painting. The horror Picasso felt was a prelude for what awaited the NAZI war and a fascinating prism to look through history, his work, his women, and his life - and that's what we did. The painting itself was the obvious front-end to this and all agreed pushing the normal ideas of research into video and auditory references was of primary importance. A strong bias was established towards a visual interface rather than textual.

Guernica HyperCard B+W prototypeAn early prototype was created in Apple's HyperCard authoring system. This design was useful, but showed a lack of centext even as one dug deeply into the topic. The following interface was painting-centric and always re-focused attention on the work itself - and was much more successful.
As HyperCard was {terminally} a black and white tool {that's one-bit, not grayscale} presenting a larger window and richer color environment required pulling some neat code hacks and slight of hand tomfoolery to paint the screen with an image and invisibly nestle the HyperCard windoid into position.

Home, where the art is Folio examples skills Timeline Vitae Contact Form and Funciton To Start of Page  

 

As we explored this reference system and compiled the information it would serve up we had a lucky break: Charlie Jackson's Silicon Beach Software was about to release a more extensible color version of hypertext authoring called SuperCard - which still esixts today. This proved vastly important in proving the worth of this project as it could suck up the work we already had done in HyperCard, embraced color as native, encouraged larger windows as well as multiple pop-up palettes. As important to me as color was it had an external {Xcommand} path to the spanking new MassMicro ColorSpace display card which fed video streams into a chroma-keyed color of the authors' choice: we had Picture In a Picture.

 

Home, where the art is To Top of PageMultimedia Threshold

 

As both Guernica and SuperCard approached completion we gratefully received SuperCard Project Manager Ben Calica who flew in to coax our Rube Goldberg collection of resources into a coherent whole that Bob could present.
Finally, it debuted at the Microsoft CD-ROM conference in 1989 after an all-nighter with Apple technical guru Jerry Hesketh literally at Bobs's feet on the dais {behind the table covering} making sure it didn't fall over in a smoking heap. The crowd went wild and that was a very good day indeed. I was sitting next to an educator who thought he'd just witnessed the Second Coming of Gutenberg - and as far as the public was concerned he probably did.
Here's the screen the audience saw:

Users choose from a line of tools across the top and click a portion of the subject {painting detail} to bring up a floating pictorial submenu typically allowing several video streams to choose from. At this point the Explorer {my prophetic term as I didn't think User was the best way to frame this activity} could ramble and meander wherever the topics interested one.

Today hundreds of millions of people pursue topics of interest through web in just this manner every single hour.
That day it was novel and received a standing ovation.

Home, where the art is Folio examples skills Timeline Vitae Contact Form and Funciton To Start of Page  

 

 

H o m a g e
From the journals of Jonathan Gibson 

In the late 80's I was Artist in Residence at RasterOps, a silicon valley video card manufacturer. This sounds nice but in a startup company it means a chair on the warm & fuzzy side of marketing. Cris-crossing the country pitching the 1st Macintosh 32-bit color video cards I was trying to make products I, as an artist, sorely wanted. Along the way the I met forward leaning people keen on conscious transformation of the media landscape.

My first real brush with multimedia as a career {besides TV specials} was a pep-talk by Alvy Ray Smith's at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry in the mid-1980's describing PIXAR's move from medical+military imaging to short animations. Andre & Wally Bee was still in vector motions study phase as computer realism desperately sought photo-realism, but he did preview the Star Trek movie Wrath of Khan "Genesis" sequence where an extreme close fly-by of a planet was created - and explained the tricks used to make it seem so real. I was hooked in my heart, but Tulane architecture school called and I succumbed to the siren song.

journal entryLater, weaned off of the intellectual fashion show architecture has become, I was back on the west coast diligently advancing the computer industry at a startup when I was sent to L.A. to meet with Bob Abel & Associates. When this opportunity to meet in-depth with Bob and Allen one Saturday morning came up I invited a friend from architecture school, Morgan Newman, to come along. Morgan and I had collaborated on several art grant requests to incorporate technology and art something like Nam June Paik {R.I.P. the very day I write this} is known for and I knew his heart and mine were in sympatico with the legend Bob projected.
Bob and Allen presented some notions of where they thought this new medium was headed and (as expected) Morgan resolved to make something happen. They eventually took their initials and formed a company, AND Communications, to develop innovative interactive educational lessons for IBM.
Sigh... If only matchmaker fees applied!
An even deeper sigh on not putting up with the bumps and twists working with Bob entailed in order to see this company to it's greater mutation as Creative Planet.

Meetings like this underscored questions about swimming in corporate waters when my talents were more free form. It had also become clear to me after banging my head against the wall Engineering erected that you simply can't tell someone making millions of dollars that they could be making more desirable products - let alone doing something wrong. I began to wonder how a starving architecture student suddenly came to be jetting around the e-world tabbing a corporate credit card, but doing nothing tangible.
By the following year I'd left the high end computer video world to start Form and Function. Before too long Morgan gave a ring about this interesting Picasso project they were getting underway. F+F was still a solo act when he 1st pulled me down for a number of extended Los Angeles adventures developing interfaces. He had setup a shoestring mini-proto MediaLab-thang to explore reasonable methods to deliver compelling media. I dug into it with vigor. Exploring the very literal bleeding edge at the intersection of film-making and interactive technology, a growing crew beat it and other prototypes into demonstrable shape.

Our first authoring program was HyperCard which dictated a simple one-bit interface with no color. By applying several tricks we gave the appearance of a color interface even though only the B+W parts were interactive. Revision Two saw hardware and software advance to the point SuperCard gave us color and vastly better window control. However, key was the Mass Micro lent us a prototype ColorSpace II video card that chroma-keyed one color from the 8-bit palette to be a video pass-through. It used horribly slow memory, but had no CPU performance hit to our pre-RISC computers. We were experimenting with the early user profiles of web-scale media encyclopedia users with via Picture-In-Picture search returns at a time when CD-ROM players were still rare in most computers and ROM burners were the size of washing machines. When I later saw MIT MediaLab footage it was deja vu all over again.
Heady stuff.

journal entryBob passed away a few years ago.
It was not always easy to work with him: part huckster charlatan, part earnest pilgrim for knowledge and creativity, I cannot say I didn't learn from him. He had what it took to succeed in the Hollywood + advertising worlds, but it did come at a cost to his psyche - I learned this from working and even living with him a short time.
R.I.P.

- Jonathan Gibson -