John Whitney Senior was an animation filmmaker, widely recognised as one of the fathers of computer animation. He created his first films with his brother James in 1939 and invented his own mechanical analog computer to automate the animation process.
Further reference:
http://dada.compart-bremen.de/item/agent/403
Pasadena, CA (USA), 1917 – Los Angeles, CA (USA), 1995
John Whitney Senior began his career creating abstract films with his brother James in 1939. Their work Five Film Exercises (1940-45) was awarded the first prize at the First International Experimental Film Competition in Belgium in 1949, the first of many awards to come. In the 1950s, he used mechanical animation techniques to create sequences for television programs and commercials, as well as engineering films on guided missile projects. In 1958, he animated the title sequence from Alfred Hitchcock’s film Vertigo (1958), produced in collaboration with graphic designer Saul Bass. In 1960 he founded Motion Graphics Incorporated, a company dedicated to creating motion picture and television title sequences and commercials. In making these films, he used his own invention, the mechanical analog computer: this machine comprised three layers of rotating tables and several rotating cameras that automated the animation process. The following year, he put together a catalog of the visual effects he had created with this device. In 1966, he became IBM’s first artist-in-residence and gradually became involved in digital image making processes, leading up to abandoning the analog computer in 1970. Between 1969 and 1970, he experimented with motion graphics computer programming at the California Institute of Technology, and by 1972 he taught his first computer graphics class at UCLA. His most famous digital film is Arabesque (1975), an elegant composition of intersecting forms that morph and dance to the sound of a Baglama. From the 1980s onwards, Whitney continued creating digital animations using faster processors and another of his inventions, an audio-visual composition program called the Whitney-Reed RDTD (Radius-Differential Theta Differential).
Whitney’s films have been exhibited in major museum exhibitions including Cybernetic Serendipity (ICA, London, 1968), Art and Science (Tel Aviv Museum, 1971), Tendencies 5: Computer Visual Research (Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb, 1973), Visual Music (MOCA and The Hirshhorn Museum, 2005), Sons et Lumières (Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2004–05), and The Third Mind (Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2009), among others.