Meet the Little-Known Genius Who Helped Make Pixar Possible [ungated] – “Alvy Ray Smith helped invent computer animation as we know it—then got royally shafted by Steve Jobs. Now he’s got a vision for where the pixel will take us next.”[1,2,3]
Pixel is a deep and challenging tome in the spirit of Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, a winding tale of science, heroes, and tyrants, all leading to the moment, sometime around the beginning of our current century, when a long-predicted digital convergence coalesced. Almost all expression—visual, textual, audio, video, you name it—has moved to the machine world, which, perhaps counterintuitively, is no less real than our physical reality. And that is not a metaphorical equivalence. It is, Smith argues, literal.
He calls this second reality Digital Light, and it’s pretty much what all of us look at and listen to when we’re not in the middle of a forest. He didn’t coin the term—it was first uttered about a decade ago by a conference organizer who asked him to give a talk with that title. “It was a term that’s everything I wanted it to be,” he says, covering “all these different aspects of what people do with pixels.”
Digital Light, as he documents, emerged into the world through a long and twisted scientific process; it’s a picaresque tale with unexpected protagonists—Jean-Baptiste Joseph Fourier, Vladimir Kotelnikov, Alan Turing—whose lives he exhumes with the passion of an obsessive genealogist. Putting together their contributions on the nature of light, sampling, and computation, Smith makes a convincing case that there’s no difference between analog and digital reality. It’s a belief that he’s held for decades. Barbara Robertson, a computer graphics journalist, remembers sitting with him at a café and hearing him say, after a contemplative silence, “You, know, everything is just waves.”
Oh, and the subject of this biography, the pixel, is not what we generally think it is. Forget your misguided belief that a pixel is one of those tiny squares on your screen. Smith explains that the pixel is the product of a two-part process in which an element of some consciously created content is presented on some sort of display. Friends, you are not looking at pixels on your screen but the expression of those pixels. What you see is Digital Light. The pixel itself? That’s just an idea. Once you get this distinction, it’s clear that Digital Light is not a second-class reality. In the 21st century, it’s equal. “Just the simple idea of separating pixels from display elements is going to seem revolutionary to people who don’t understand the technology,” Robertson says.
–Making of the Genesis Sequence from Star Trek II
–The Adventures of Andre & Wally B