The craft behind the work resides in the world of computer languages and computer hardware. Each panel has a small custom-built computer which runs a program that sequences the display of the images. These images have, in turn, been processed using other programs I have written.

In earlier work I used ready-made computers and commercial software to sequence my images. For a variety of technical issues these became unworkable so, in the end, I decided to assemble computers from scratch and write a program (and learn a new computer language) to display the images.

The image sequence does not repeat but continues indefinitely. The computer program selects an image to display, locates which part of the image to display and makes the transition from one to the next. In any one work there may be from five to a hundred images, however, the combinations are astronomical in number. The works may have a single subject but countless perspectives.

Like a painting the works have no beginning and no end, but slowly evolve. Moments are seen and then are gone...

John Maeda
The true skill of a digital designer is the practiced art of computer programming, or computation, ...

I have reached this conclusion through my experimental studies across print and digital media, together with the recent worldwide emphasis in the field of design to reconcile the relevance of programming. This is reinforced by the countless young designers who ask me the same question, "How do you learn to program?"

I have come to realize that the only correct answer is the same a painter might give when asked, "How do you paint?" My reply is, "You need a lot of practice, and most importantly, a lot of natural talent." Many are not satisfied with this answer and assume that there is a more definitive answer I am purposely hiding- a secret manual or book. I believe that this odd misconception of the difficulty involved in programming is related to the average person's experience with programming a video cassette recorder or a microwave oven.

The creation of the images and the display system itself, are programs I have written in C and OpenGL
Push Button Art
These works are fully contained within the panel mounted on the wall so that all that is required is a standard electrical outlet. The panels for the work are approximately 43 inches wide and 35½ inches high.

Starting the work
The work is started by pressing a small green RUN button on the lower left-hand-side behind the front panel. Various start-up screens are displayed and, in less than a minute, the artwork will display a test chart, a title page and then automatically start its display sequence. To turn off the work, press the RUN button again, the work will then shut-down.

The perception is that while such programming can be disorienting initially, a well-written manual can carry you step by step through the process. So why shouldn't the same be true for a computer? If it were that easy, I would not have wasted 20 years trying to master the computational medium.

In the past, when new materials such as steel and glass, or mechanical advancements such as electricity and motors, first appeared, they seemed magical, but were nevertheless fathomable in a physical sense. Technology was either macroscopic or microscopic, and in either case you could build an analogue to something already existing in the physical world. Computation, on the other hand, is often misunderstood because the complexities of software and the process of creating it are invisible.
In computing, C is a general purpose, block structured computer programming language developed in 1972 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories.
The electrical supply required is: AC Input 100 - 240V ~ 3.0A, 50/60 Hz so the work will function, without modification, in most parts of the world.
I wrote my very first program in the ALGOL language which ran on a KDF9 computer. OpenGL (Open Graphics Library) is a standard specification defining a cross-language cross-platform API for writing applications that produce 2D and 3D computer graphics.