Jane Veeder

Jane Veeder (born 1944) is an American digital artist, filmmaker and educator. She is a professor at San Francisco State University in the Department of Design and Industry, at which she held the position of chair between 2012 and 2015. Veeder is best known for her pioneering work in early computer graphics, however she has also worked extensively with traditional art forms such as painting, ceramics, theatre, and photography.

Veeder moved away from traditional art making and began her work in the digital arts in 1976 after her enrollment in the graduate program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) where she first discovered video as an artistic medium. In 1982, her video 'Montana' became the first computer graphics piece to be featured in the video collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Her video work typically involves working with a computer to create the images, rather than a video recorder, to achieve a more direct relationship between the artist and the piece. Many pieces are meant to involve participation between the viewer and the work itself. Veeder's work marks some of the significant steps that took digital technology into the fine arts, which never had been done previously.

Early life and education Both of Jane Veeder's parents were artists, her mother was a painter and her father was a photographer. In the early 1970s, Veeder moved from California to the neighborhood of Pilsen in Chicago, Illinois.

From 1975 until 1977, Veeder pursued her MFA degree at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) where she studied video and filmmaking. After enrolling in the School of the Art Institute of Chicago's MFA program, Veeder began taking film classes. By the end of her first year at SAIC, Veeder had discovered video as an artistic medium and switched entirely from studying Ceramic Sculpture to studying Video and Film.

Veeder collaborated with Phil Morton to create the video art pieces "Program #7" and "Program #9" in 1978.

Collaborative work

Program #7 Between 1976 and 1982, Jane Veeder traveled the western mountains of the United States with Phil Morton. On these road trips the two would shoot video of their surroundings using a portable video recorder. The article, meant for IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, analyzed the ways in which computer art programs were emulating real world processes digitally rather than making use of the unique capabilities that computers had to offer. Montana is an interactive piece incorporating computer synthesized graphics. The piece was displayed as a video and has a duration of 3:05 minutes. Warpitout is an interactive piece that incorporates realtime morphing of an image of the players face. The player could use the controls on the unit to distort the image of themselves in realtime. Bustergrid is another 2-Dimensional printed artwork created using computer graphics measuring 21.5 x 28 inches in size, the same dimensions as Bubblespiral

One year later in 1983, Veeder only produced one artwork that would be shown at that years SIGGRAPH Art Show, the piece, titled Floater, is a 6:12 minuter long real-time computer generated video piece. Again, two years later, at the 1985 SIGGRAPH Art Show Veeder only exhibited one work. The work exhibited that year, titled Vizgame and was a computer generated interactive artwork. The piece allowed the player to build a real-time generated animation on a 16-square grid, allowing the player to control the animation of each block.

In 2018 Veeder work was included in the Chicago New Media 1973-1992 exhibition, curated by Jon Cates.