NNON

NNON was conceived, programmed, and generated by Stephen Nowlin at the Booth Computing Center, California Institute of Technology, 1970. Filming technology was provided by John Whitney. “I filmed NNON at the old Booth Computing Center at Caltech, 1970, in the middle of the night which were the only hours I could schedule computer time. I started the camera-computer interface at about 11pm and then went out and slept in my VW bus while it filmed, and it’s possible a janitor might have opened a door to the room where the camera was running and affected the exposure in certain places. Computer graphics were experimental in 1970 and nobody got to do them except at places like Caltech where there were big machines.”–Stephen Nowlin