Macintosh 1984: The Beginning of Digital Art
Today everyone is talking about the launch of the Apple Vision Pro, a device that promises to be the future of what Apple calls « Spatial Computing ». However, 40 years ago Apple first released the Macintosh, a personal computer that would become the cornerstone for the birth of digital art and a new style called: 1-Bit Art.
This computer came with a software called MacPaint, which changed the way artists and plastic arts enthusiasts could create their works. It introduced a digital canvas, a new medium in which they could make art without getting their hands dirty, erase parts of their drawing without leaving marks, print unlimited copies, and create as many works as they wished. And that software was the starting point for programs we all dearly love today: Illustrator, Photoshop, and CorelDraw.
Its advancements and limitations gave birth to the 1-Bit Art style, a style that is seldom talked about in the NFT world, but that could be cataloged as the cave painting of our digital era. With only two colors on your computer monitor (white or black), a resolution of 512×342, and only 128kb of RAM memory, the art you could create was limited and that’s where each artist’s creativity flourished. Michael Green’s Zen Movie is a great example of what artists achieved with this new technique in 1984.
I feel the need to introduce collectors and artists to 1-Bit Art, an artistic style that broke the rules of art and marked a new path for disruptive artists who thought digitally. For this reason, I have created a piece in this style, using the tools our predecessors had: Macintosh 1.0 and MacPaint 1.0.
This video is the representation of a one-way trip, a place from which you don’t come back. There is a certain peace one finds in these very limited systems, with no notifications, no internet, no AI, no colors. The fact of not having to choose colors makes the drawing what it truly is, the representation of an idea. It is the closest thing to being with a pencil and a paper.
To make this work I spent several days looking for the best option, since in my country you can’t find these types of computers. Therefore, my only choice was to emulate a Macintosh on my devices. There are various options but none of them is an « app » that you install and everything works. Several steps are needed and, above all, an understanding of how these computers worked. You’re going to need many .dsk and .rom files, something not used nowadays. The best option I found was to use the Mini vMac emulator, with which I was able to run Macintosh 1.0 on my MacBook Pro, on my Windows workstation, and lastly, on my iPad Pro. This last one was the definitive solution but was the hardest to make work, since extra steps are needed to install the system. However, once installed I could simulate having a Macintosh + a KoalaPad, the precursor of all graphic tablets available today.
After having everything installed, the simplicity and limitations of the system for artists start to appear: only one « undo », no layers, no multitasking, no zoom out, no colors, no page size, no file export, and many other « no’s ». At first, it is frustrating and you must experiment and inform yourself a lot about how to do things correctly and what applications existed at that time to accomplish your task.
After overcoming that stage, the experience was magical and challenging. My mind had to understand how to work with all these limitations, and this process brought out a part of my creativity that had been dormant: simplicity. If I want to represent a bat flying I only have to make 6 pixels in a V shape. Nowadays, with the avanced digital tools and current high resolutions, my works demand more and more details. However, with the 1-Bit Art each work is a representation of an idea, a type of digital impressionism, which allows spectators to imagine what that place would look like, what colors it would have, and what things would be like in reality.
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Music by Scott Buckley.
« Scott Buckley – Horizons » is under a Creative Commons (CC BY 3.0) license.
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/#ref-appropriate-credit
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