In another comment reply to Gumby, I mentioned how I often accidentally call them "Grateful Dead Conferences", because so many tech people I knew and worked with in Silicon Valley and the Free Software community and regularly saw at computer conferences and trade shows would show up at Dead shows.
The Raster Masters would lug enormous million dollar high end SGI workstations across North Shoreline Boulevard from SGI headquarters to Shoreline Amphitheater, and actually pack them into trucks and travel on tour with the Dead, performing live improvisational psychedelic graphics on the screen behind the band in real time to their live music, using an ensemble of custom software they wrote themselves, mixing together and feeding back the video of several SGI workstations in real time.
At one concert, some hippie came up to me, pointed at the graphics on the screen behind the stage in awe, and said, "I took all these shrooms, I'm tripping my balls off, and you would not fucking believe what they're making me seeing on the screen up there!!!" I explained to him that I hadn't taken any shrooms, but I could see the exact same thing!
The Raster Masters wrote and performed their own software,
which reflected the taping and sharing culture of the Dead scene, including ElectroPaint and the Panel Library from NASA, whose source code and recorded live performances were distributed with SGI's demo software and free source code library.
The improvisational software was like a musical instrument performed in real time along with the music.
ElectroPaint and other Raster Master performances were featured in the Infrared Roses video:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrared_Roses
>Infrared Roses is a live compilation album by the Grateful Dead. It is a conglomeration of their famous improvisational segments "Drums" and "Space".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkhr23asO-M
All this was long before "VJ" live performance graphics became so commoditized by widely available off-the-shelf VJ software that enabled any club kid VJ to show up late, set up their Powerbook, open a playlist in VLC, press the space bar, and then focus their attention on popping pills of ecstasy and snorting lines of coke instead of performing for the rest of the show.
https://www.wired.com/1994/06/raster-masters/
>Raster Masters: Enough with virtual reality -- virtual hallucinations?
>"Free-form mind blowing," is how Raster Master Creon Levit describes the goal of his band's visual music. "We're trying to develop a new performance medium: live computer-graphics ensemble performance.
>"Raster Master's improvisations are a cascade of swirling, metamorphosing images: '60s light shows grafted onto '80s music video, real time. "Enough of reality – let's do virtual hallucinations," Levit declares. "We are instrument builders, playing away on the visual equivalent of the first synthesizers."
>Give this group one thing: They've got some high-end equipment. No wimpy Video Toasters for this outfit! Try two Onyx RealityEngines2 along with two Indigo2 Extremes. It takes a 12-foot truck to pack up all their beefy machinery; setting up for a performance takes five hours. For these artists, corporate sponsorship resembles traditional patronage of the arts more than it does the run-of-the-mill Miller Beer logo stuck in your face. Two of the Raster Masters work for Silicon Graphics; among their duties is writing the code that creates their visual music – code that a Macintosh could never crunch. SGI, of course, also provides the machines that the Raster Masters use.
>Of the group's three highly skilled programmers, two – Levit and David Tristram – worked at the NASA Ames Research Center, in Mountain View, California. Levit still works there. When Tristram left NASA, he went to work at SGI. There he met Ron Fischer, the Raster Masters' third programmer. Fischer compares performance graphics to "puppets, directly reacting to many operator actions at once."
>Graphic designer Maggie Hoppe plays the role of mixer-cum-video-switcher. Sound designer Johnathan Nelson spins a dense mix of sounds. Look for the Raster Masters in Amsterdam at the TILE Convention on June 28 and at the Montreux Music Festival in Montreux, Switzerland, in mid-July. Stateside, you can see them at Digital World in Los Angeles on June 9 and at SIGGRAPH in Orlando, Florida, July 24 to 29. E-mail: rm-request@telsa.esd.sgi.com.
David Tristram's and Eric Raible's GL based "Panel Library" and scheme based "Panel Editor" was a 3D user interface toolkit and gui editor that drew widgets with GL (unheard of at the time: everybody thought they was crazy for drawing widgets in 3D, not only with real beveled edges, but even attached to animated 3D objects in the world) originally developed at NASA NAS (Numerical Aerodynamic Simulation) for interactive data visualization, which David also used to implement the live performance user interface to ElectroPaint (with banks of automatic bouncing sliders whose value, min, max, speed and wrap you could scrub and adjust in real time), which was one of the programs they used to perform at Grateful Dead Concerts, that was eventually distributed as a screen saver (with all the bouncing sliders hidden, but playing back recorded performances) on the SGI Indy (the Indigo without the go ;) ).
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19920000697
>Panel Library And Editor computer program is grapical-user-interface builder program for use on workstations of Silicon Graphics IRIS family. Program creates "widgets" manipulated by user. Appearance similar to X-Windows System. Used by programmers to write user-friendly mouse-driven application programs for IRIS workstations. Panel Library (v9.8) and Editor (v1.1) written in C Language and Scheme.
https://www.nas.nasa.gov/assets/pdf/techreports/1992/rnd-92-...
>NAS User Interfaces: Dan Wallach and Tom Woodrow. NAS Systems Development Branch, NAS Systems Division, NASA Ames Research Center.
>Abstract: Graphical User Interfaces at NAS have been developed over the past five years using the proprietary Silicon Graphics Inc. (SGI) Graphics Library (GL) as well as the locally developed Panel Library. The Panel Library was built to offer a higher level library to build user interfaces . Panel Library has been highly successful, but suffers from several problems. With the forthcoming upgrade of the Silicon Graphics Operating System IRIX 4.0 there are several new alternatives with respect to user interface development . This paper describes the alternatives, recommends a transition to an X/Motif development environment and defines an implementation
plan.
>1. Current Development Environment
>Currently, the production SGI workstations at NAS are running the IRIX
Operating System, version 3.3. In the next Operating System release, the Window
System will transition from a Sun Microsystems NeWS-based implementation to an
MIT X-based implementation. This should not cause significant problems for the
majority of existing graphics applications. However, those applications which use
specific and even undocumented features of the current window system will require
software modifications. We have had development versions of the Operating System
in-house for some time and have verified this.
>Two of the major GL based tools developed at NAS are the Panel Library
and Panel Editor. These were developed by David Tristram and Eric Raible as an
alternative to writing user interfaces directly in GL. The Panel Library defines high
level graphical objects which are composed of lower level GL primitives. These
graphic objects can be used as components in a graphical user interface. At the time
the Panel Library was developed, there were no other high level user interface libraries
available on the SGI platform. Currently the Panel Library is used in a number of applications,
both in-house (most notably FAST) and external. It is available
through COSMIC. There are currently several problems with Panel Library and the Panel Editor:
>1) We have lost most of our Panel Library development expertise (both the author
and the major support developer have left NASA or moved on to new jobs within the organization).
>2) There is an inadequate support organization (in fact, bugs are being fixed by users rather than NAS).
>3) The Panel Editor makes extensive use of undocumented and no longer supported calls. It will require a major rewrite to function in IRIX 4.0
https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/42812582.pdf
>EAGLEView: A Surface and Grid Generation Program and its Data Management.
>Abstract: An old and proven grid generation code, the EAGLE grid generation package by Joe Thompson, is given an added dimension of a graphical interface and a real-time database manager. The Numerical Aerodynamic Simulation (NAS) Panel Library is used for the graphical user interface. Through the panels, EAGLEView constructs the EAGLE script command and sends it to EAGLE to be processed. After the object is created, the script is saved in a mini-buffer which can be edited and/or saved and reinterpreted.
They also shared the Panel Library and ElectroPaint source code for free, long before SGI released a later version of it with their demo software:
http://66.111.2.18/pub/The_Unix_Archive/Unix_Usenet/comp.sys...
This is the panel library, a set of routines used for building "control
panel" interfaces to interactive graphic applications. These routines
let you assemble "actuators" like sliders, buttons, stripcharts, and
typeouts into control panels that live on separate mex windows. As the
user mouses the actuators, values accessable to the applications programmer,
(THAT'S YOU!) appear in predefined structures. You can also set the values
and watch the positions or states of the actuators change. You can
customize the actuators in many ways because alot of their properties are
controlled by indirect functions that you can replace with your own. In
fact, you can add new actuators without changing any of the panel library
code because the initialization function is one of these indirect guys!
Someday all this will be nicely documented, but until then, hopefully you
can get something out of the 20 or so demo programs. Try ep, the
psychedelic electro-paint program. Have fun.
https://archive.org/details/1989-proceedings-5th-comp-graphi...
>Fifth Computer Graphics Workshop Proceedings
>Author: David A. Tristam
Title: Controlling Virtual Words with the Panel Library
Pages: 83-92
Publisher: USENIX
Proceedings: USENIX Fifth Computer Graphics workshop
Date: November 16-17, 1989
Location: Monterey, CA
Institution: NASA Ames Research Center
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=StA81MNuqB8
>Electropaint on SGI Indy: A capture of the great screensaver electropaint on an SGI Indy. There is no sound (originally I had Mahavishnu Orchestra's "Miles Beyond" but youtube flagged me for it), but feel free to blast your own music while watching.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObdtoLuSaWM
>6 minutes of ElectroPaint
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbWpsrNYfaQ
>SGI IRIX ElectroPaint Screen Saver.
David Tristram is a "Viviographer" who went from NASA to SGI to Adobe, where he's now working on some equally amazing interactive psychedelic graphics, that I sure hope make it into the next release of Photoshop!
https://web.archive.org/web/20190331141024/http://tristram.c...
>Simply put, Viviography is the art of creating art in motion. Derived from the Latin prefix "vivi" or "alive," Viviography uses the power of modern computers to create images that are born on the screen, then advance, retreat, shift, ascend, or disappear at the artist’s bidding. Viviography allows the artist to achieve the spontaneity of jazz performance in a visual medium. When accompanied by music, Mr. Tristram’s Viviography can engender a synaesthetic response in the viewer, where audience members report the experience of seeing music, or hearing pictures.
Brief History of ElectroPaint:
https://web.archive.org/web/20110814074647/http://darkside.c...
David Tristram:
>What is Electro-Paint? Why is it so hard to use? Why should I waste my time with it? Electro-Paint is a string of bytes, tiny organizations of magnetic fields, minute ripples in an electronic flow. It has controls. Electro-Paint responds, but in ways that are hard to describe. It can be frustrating. It is not automatic. It will reward attention. It has no purposes, except those that are self-evident. It has a reset button. It has subtle bugs. It's free.
>Try a little "wrst", with some "zoom", ... ...and maybe a bit of "flip" or "spin"...
Ron Fischer:
>David Tristram wrote Electropaint while working at NASA before he came to Silicon Graphics. While at SGI David made the source code availible to the company as a demo. For a time, Electropaint was part of the SGI demo source code distribution, but no longer.
>Extended versions and variations of Electropaint were used in public performances by a "visual music band" called "Raster Masters" that David led, and I was a part of. We toured Germany and played at various parties and shows in the USA. Unfortunately our "guitars" were Onyx RE/2 machines that cost considerably more than a Stratocaster. SGI never believed there was money in the live music performance market and over time withdrew its support. They were probably right. Of course, the forthcoming Visual PC changes that cost.
>Since leaving SGI David has written new software on the PC which is a "next generation" of image generator. Its source code and software technology is unrelated to Electropaint. This may eventually become a product.
>As far as I know, the old SGI version of Electropaint is neither publicly availible nor being further developed.
>...and FYI I do not have any version of the Electropaint source code myself.
>Requests for electropaint source code have become a nearly annual feature in Usenet forums and elsewhere. In 2002 a programmer named Matevz Bradac found the source for the 1989 initial release of Panel Library and posted the 'discovery', and eventually pulled the sources together into a Visual Studio project for Windows. Rather than porting the original GL calls to OpenGL, Bradac decided to write wrappers between GL and OpenGL. He called his wrapper 'IGL' and the recompiled electropaint he termed 'GLectric'. The now-defunct website was found here:
https://web.archive.org/web/20041011130323/http://users.volj...
>about IGL:
IGL is an Open Source port of IrisGL library to OpenGL.
Current version is 0.1.8 which incorporates both Win32 and X11 implementations.
>IGL history:
i. electro-paint
>first, there was electro-paint, an SGI Irix screensaver written by David A. Tristram. the screensaver was simple at its base - triangles or squares moving around on the screen - but so effective that the crowd rejoiced.
>everyone wanted the sources, but SGI never released them (or did they?). everyone wanted to get to know the algorithms used for polygon movement, but it came down to guessing (polar coordinates etc.).
>then, a programmer (me) was enlightened, and the sources were resurrected. electro-paint was posted to newsgroups by David A. Tristram himself, while still working with NASA. it was however disguised as a part of the (in)famous Panel Library and - thanks to Google Groups - the whole package could be downloaded. thanks to David A. Tristram, the Panel Library and Electropaint sources were made a part of IGL distribution (as of version 0.1.7).
Free IGL ElectroPaint source code:
https://donhopkins.com/home/code/igl_0.1.8.zip
https://donhopkins.com/home/code/igl_0.1.8/
ElectroPaint Documentation:
https://donhopkins.com/home/code/igl_0.1.8/docs/electropaint...
ElectroPaint source code:
https://donhopkins.com/home/code/igl_0.1.8/src/panel/D.app/e...
Panel Library Automatic Bouncing Multi Slider source code:
https://donhopkins.com/home/code/igl_0.1.8/src/panel/mslider...