Ghosts in the machine

George Cramer brings the artist’s soul to high-tech computing

George Cramer (center), with two of his students, Scott Dunahee (left) and Stefan Baum.

George Cramer’s artistic career took a wild turn 12 years ago from a seemingly ho-hum influence: a Christmas present to his two teenage sons.

A fellow professor in the UW–Madison art department gave Cramer’s children a Commodore 64 computer, a crude toy by today’s standards. The gift came with something called a Koala Pad, which allowed the user to paint pictures on the screen. Cramer spent the remainder of Christmas Day engrossed in the new family toy.

From those first primitive sketches, a multi-media pioneer was born.

Cramer, a sculptor and painter by tradition, is now surrounded by an expensive fleet of high-end computers in his sixth-floor Humanities studio. He’s staked a national reputation in the growing field of digital art. Cramer is taking computer art as far as the technology will take him, into the rarefied air of virtual reality.

At age 60, Cramer is working to create a new academic tradition on campus with a marriage of art and technology. He views the two fields as estranged soulmates who have more in common than we’re led to believe.

Cramer finds the mix of art and technology liberating. “Some people believe the computer doesn’t allow humanity into their work,” he says. Technology, they argue, makes work feel “too cold and precise.” But Cramer says the computer is no different than any other artistic tool, whether it be a paint brush or natural dyes for a prehistoric cave painting.

“This is the first time in history that an artist can share three-dimensional dreams,” Cramer says. “Before this, there were words and flat images and illusions and sculptures, that’s it. You can enter these worlds and become totally immersed in them.”

His courses in virtual reality and three-dimensional computer art enroll 50 students a year and attract hundreds more. Along with artists, the courses attract students from fields as diverse as chemistry, architecture and engineering. On one hand, he teaches many students with great technical abilities who feel uncomfortable about creative expression. On the other, he sees art students who are searching for their voice in a new medium. Both types of students leave his classes more well- rounded and versatile, he says.

As the final project in his introductory 3-D course, students have to create a 60- second animation based on some initial computer-generated paintings. It’s a huge undertaking, since each scene contains dozens of frames per second.

His students constantly surprise him. They usually begin by mimicking some of the images they’ve seen in film and advertising. But then they make mistakes, and the mistakes take them on creative detours.

“We’re after emotional content,” he says, noting that the technology is merely a means to a creative end. “My job isn’t computer training as much as trying to keep the aesthetics as high as possible.”

A burly, silver-bearded man, Cramer’s attire of choice is blue jeans and an untucked flannel shirt. He would look just as comfortable swinging an ax in the woodshed as he does in the art studio. His art has been featured in more than 120 international, national and regional exhibits, yet he’s also a former engineering school graduate who is relentlessly fascinated with science and technology.

Cramer collaborates with faculty across campus, finding some of his most fruitful connections with the College of Engineering. He uses virtual reality equipment in the college’s Model Advance Facility, and is helping the college update work in computational science. He’s part of a research team that is advancing the academic uses of computers, through a $4.8 million grant from Intel Corp.

He’s passionate about his cross-discipline connections, which he considers the future of the university. “A university should bring people together,” he says. “With multimedia, we don’t have a choice any more.

“It’s going to take care of the problem of people staking artistic territories, because there is no one path,” he says. “You have to be good at everything to do this.”

In keeping with his collaborative style, Cramer creates very stark contrasts in many of his 3-D works. Striking neon-colored poles, pylons and spheres are often superimposed over a natural landscape of clouds, trees, ponds and stars. Sometimes the natural and technical images bleed together, where blue skies and white clouds are contoured around a soup-can like cylinder. He often augments his computer images with hand-painted scenes, done by laying a Plexiglas plate over the computer print. The two mediums combine to give the works a deeper texture.

For a closer look at Cramer’s art, visit the online Williams Gallery of Digital Art at Princeton University (http://www.wmgallery.com/index.html). The Williams Gallery has brought together some of the emerging leaders in the field of electronic arts. Cramer also has an exhibit at the Peltz Gallery in Milwaukee.

Such successes have failed to make Cramer pretentious about his work. Perusing through some recent prints, he occasionally comments, “This one is a mistake,” or, “This is just bizarre.”

But his personal convictions come through: He does not want to see beauty and humanity left in the dust of the burgeoning information age.

“If you want to be part of something that does more than mess up the world,” he says, “art can do that.”