VICTOR ACEVEDO

Created in 1987, the ECTOPLASMIC KITCHEN series was Victor Acevedo’s first important group of digital art images. The series was created with a software package called Artwork. This was a 2.5D Vector Graphics Software licensed by West End Film/Pansophic. 2.5D (Two and a half ‘D’, D=dimensions) means it supported mouse controlled, manipulation of on-picture-plane graphical objects within any implicate or explicate polygon domain toward convergent perspectival vanishing points. However, the software’s computer graphic capabilities would not be classed as that of a full 3D modeling system.

The original DOS-based image file was saved to a 5.25” floppy disk; usually written to a ‘Pansophic’ flavor of the PIC or Hex format. However, the NFT linked JPG files presented in this exhibition were produced from high-resolution scans of 35mm slides that were output via a 2K Matrix digital film recorder directly from the original computer files in 1987. The slide film was developed by the artist himself in a small dark room, after-hours at the business-to-business 35mm slide production service bureau, where he worked in the Spring of that year.

The key image of the series is the eponymous ECTOPLASMIC KITCHEN v01.

“What I consider my first successful computer graphic image is ECTOPLASMIC KITCHEN v01. For me, it’s the definitive version in the set of many variants based on a photograph I took using 35mm slide film in 1983. Combining influences from both M.C. Escher and R. Buckminster Fuller, it combines Escher-inspired open-packed zoomorphics enclosed in a synergetic great-circle spherical domain. The Escher-like creatures are arrayed symmetrically around 3-fold roto-centers and emerge from an underlying triangular and hexagonal grid.”  

– Victor Acevedo