Egg on Toast

Alvy Ray Smith

©1977, Alvy Ray Smith, All Rights Reserved.

This was the first digital painting larger than a framebuffer. I made it using my program BigPaint which handled paintings with resolutions that were multiples of a "framebuffer" size of 512 x 486. This piece was 2x2 framebuffers, or 1024 x 972. The "egg" is a flying saucer created from two ellipsoids rendered from 3D geometry and lighting and then distorted and melted with the smear painting technique in BigPaint. The "crust" is a field of random numbers stored in a framebuffer, suitably softened and darkened to indicate perspective and depth. The "salt and pepper" are hand placed single pixels of black and white paint.

It was published in The Computer Age: A Twenty-Year View, edited by Michael L. Dertouzos and Joel Moses, to illustrate an article by Nicholas Negroponte entitled Return of the Sunday Painter (The MIT Press, 1979, first paperback edition 1980: pages 21-37, Egg on Toast on color plate following page 33).

Created at NYIT in Old Westbury, Long Island, in 1977.