Copper Frances Giloth: Skippy Peanut Butter Jars

  • ©,

Artist(s):


Title:


    Skippy Peanut Butter Jars

Exhibition:


Creation Year:


    1980

Medium:


    Screen Display

Category:


Artist Statement:


    In the summer of 1979, a Bally Arcade Home Video game, converted to Zgrass Home Computer, moved into my tiny Chicago apartment. No longer was I making art in the computer lab in the engineering building. Instead, I was at home in my eight-by-six-foot studio pounding on a keyboard. On this little computer, which used audio tape as its storage medium, I wrote programs that made pictures and animations. From the excitement of being home and alone with my computer came the comical autobiographical computer animation Skippy Peanut Butter Jars – my life in 320-by-200 resolution at two bits per pixel.

    Over the years, many other computers and their peripherals moved in and then out of my house or up to my attic. From these ever-changing configurations of technology, stories have emerged as computer animations, video installations, artist books, plotter drawings, and Web sites. In 1995, the arrival of a Mac Powerbook, digital camera, scanner and ink jet printer enabled me to make Thirdperson: A Computer Life in Which She Poses. The story is structured around a word/architectural motif stolen from Frank Lloyd Wrights’s Larkin building. It takes the physical form of an accordion-style artist book, rambling and revealing that period of my life when computers visually punctuated daily existence.