A 1991 animation frames early CGI in religious imagery

Eternal Family is streaming Vision infogothique for members, and the reel announcing it undersells the tape considerably. Alain Mongeau and Eric Mattson made it in 1991. It runs eight minutes and seventeen seconds, carries no dialogue, and opens by pushing the eye into the surface of a numerical image rather than across it — through the grain of the thing, into whatever is behind the pixel.

What it finds back there is not a demo reel. It is an encyclopedia of religious iconography: mythical creatures, gothic ornament, the visual furniture of belief, all of it rendered on the polygon budget of 1991. The claim is that computer graphics did not arrive from nowhere at the end of the 1980s, that it had walked into a job illuminated manuscripts and cathedral glass had been doing for centuries.

Vithèque, which distributes the tape for Montreal’s Vidéographe, files it under animation rather than documentary, and that is the right call. It is not explaining rendering to a 1991 audience so much as performing what rendering was for.

Mongeau is the name to notice. Nine years after this, Mongeau founded MUTEK; before that came the chair of the ISEA board and a co-founding role at Montreal’s Society for Arts and Technology. So this is early work by someone who spent the following three decades building the institutions that decide which digital art gets seen at all, and you can watch the thesis being worked out in public.

Games inherited precisely the same problem — how do you make a rendered object feel like it has weight and history behind it — and mostly solved it by pointing at cathedrals too. We came at this from the other end with Keiken on CGI cinema and collective belief, which is the same argument running forward instead of back.