MITThe Dean's Gallery
. . .
 
Phil McAlary:
Images from 1's & 0's

February 1 - March 16, 1995

Curated by Michelle Fiorenza

Ten years ago, while developing an interest in video production, I became a member of the Boston Film and Video Foundation and also Cambridge Community Television. Through these organizations, I learned production and editing techniques as well as how to use a computer for character generation, special effects and image manipulation from digitized video and photographs. Many of the images in this show started out first as photographs, or actual objects which were scanned by a video camera and input into my computer. They were then imported into either a paint or an image processing program for further manipulation. The largest images on display were output to an HP DesignJet ink jet plotter and the smaller images were output to either a Tektronix Phaser or Apple printer. Once the images are stored as digital information, I then import them into either a paint or an image processing program for further manipulation. The process is lots of fun and full of surprises, but it can also be frustrating because of the quirkiness of the computer and printer technology. The title of my show came from the way a computer translates a code of ones and zeros to "light" an individual pixel (picture element). Thousands of these colored pixels, through the number handling ability of the computer, become an image on the computer screen.

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