This Amiga self-portrait from 1988 is where the love of computers and art meet in my first historically documented moment. My love of computers existed since elementary school. I had always used them to create artistic things from multimedia middle school ridiculousness to learning BASIC to program graphics by hand.

But all of those things are vapor now. Only this remains. A lovely relic of things past and things to come.

Upon entering my first semester of college, we were given classes in most of the laboratories. But the computer graphics lab is what drew me. The professor, help! I can’t remember his name, had a surveillance camera that we could scan from directly.

It was black and white only. But he had created this lovely armature with a plexiglass wheel quartered with a transparent layer and then three layers with RGB gels. To get a color photograph you had to sit perfectly still and take four shots and then layers them. Absolute brilliance!

I took to it like a duck to water. It absorbed me in a way that no other department did at college. Not to mention it being so ahead of its time.

This particular piece is a simple black and white shot colored in an Amiga program called Digipaint. Then as a printing method we had a Polaroid device that allowed for actual shots from the Amiga. Absolute brilliance again!

I did several projects on the Amiga. A great slide show with all the graphics created in Amiga to The Smiths classic How Soon is Now.

I still have so many disks of Amiga work I long to see. But after numerous attempts at emulation I have never been able to recover them. Maybe now is the time to check into a service that could transfer them for me. Anyone?