The historical avant-garde in Europe had two sets of detractors, distinct from one another: the academicians and the bourgeois. In responding to these groups, they have been combined and attacked collectively, as in Baudellaires essay To the Bourgeois that attacks both groups for their incomprehension of Impressionism and rejection of modern subjects. In the United States, both groups in this cultural conflict would be combined, as would the division between avant-garde and Modernist, creating a different dynamic in the evolution of Modernism.
I have a new essay published on Vague Terrain about the cat organ, the mouse organ, the Jingle Cats albums, and the development of sampling. It's an interesting piece of theory suggesting where the idea of semiotic reassembly may have come from and what that means....
Edward E. Zajac (1926-2011) created the first computer film as a way to visualize the modeling of the astrophysics work he was doing that was concerned with the orbital dynamics of communications satellites. It is the ability to use digital software to model, and then generate, visual imagery depicting complex, labor-intensive subjects for traditional animation that is the initial reason for the development of computer animation in the 1960s at Bell Labs in New Jersey.
