Cascade, 1994, Iris ink jet print on Sommerset Rag, 120 x 420 inches

The Project

Cascade, is a 10 x 35 foot mural-sized Iris print which was produced with Cone Editions Press, Vermont, in 1994. Cascade was the largest Iris print on record, on the scale of the grandest of oil paintings and tapestries. Installed for The Computer in The Studio exhibition at the DeCordova Museum, Lincoln, Massachusetts, It lined the wall of a semi circular gallery. Viewers standing in the center of the gallery became entirely immersed in Cascades visual environment. The artwork took up 180 degrees of visual perception, leaving no space in peripheral vision for other competing visual data.Cascade was the flagship of a suite of 30 x 44 inch prints entitled Instrumental Variations published by Cone Editions.

For me creating fine art on the computer represented a radical departure from the hands-on methods of drawing and painting I typically used. "When you drag a brush across the paper, you can never really predict what the brush will do. You know the direction of the line, but you never quite know what the character of the mark will be." For my digital art, "I wanted the computer to create its own dirt - its own interference." So Jon Cone developed special filters to help my digitally created images retain freshness and the autographic immediacy of a traditional drawing. I used a stylus, a digital pen, to draw the image in Photoshop. At the time Jon Cone wanted to show the machine in action. In an interview with Eileen Fritsch from The Big Picture I am quoted as saying: "The medium is not ink, but rather pixels, which were intentionally kept large and individualized. I never intended to mimic the effects of oil paint or brush marks at this time because computer generated art doesn't have the sense of direct touch. You do it by remote control. The instrument of the computer has a character of its own - it's as different as an electric guitar is from the human voice."

The final print of Cascade was seamlessly tiled from 32 separate sheets of fine-art paper with no variations in color or density from one tile to another.