(1) — a.. - Commodore Is Awesome

10-
projects both large and small. Russell Moore
doesn't really care about all the doom and
gloom currently enveloping the Amiga market.
in fact he almost approves of it He likes the
idea that the Amiga is a 'punk' machine, as he
terms it And he sees the Amiga going on long
past its sell-by date, with people in the know
buying up second-hand machines and scavenging
parts from broken Amigas - sort of a
Mad Max scenario, if you like. He thinks it's
great that there will be people abandoning the
machine in their droves and putting their old
Arnim up for sale so that he can buy them
and make them into interactive point of information
kiosks at a fraction that it would cost
for a similar set-up using a PC.
Russell also believes that the Amiga will
continue to be a creative machine with a hard
core of dedicated users providing the software
Chris Adles - No he doesn't pla y ke yboards
for Erasure
THE MAIN MAN
Tony Patrickson is an ad hoc lecturer at the
University of Ulster in Belfast where he takes
up the thankless task of showing the students
(and even some of the teachers) there how to
get to grips with electronic media. Most
universities have computer equipment these
days and Belfast is particularly well catered
for with a nice mix of PCs, Macs and even a
Silicon Graphics machine, but there is something
of a generation gap between the
administration, the lecturers and the students,
where the administrators and lecturers are
aware of the new media, but are more interested
in the fields they learnt at university,
like painting and sculpture.
it's a similar problem that was faced by
people wanting to study photography as an
art form earlier this century, and it will probably
take longer to overcome owing to the
prejudice against computer art which Tony
Patrickson thinks he has an explanation for.
-
Tview
art as a visible expression of their wealth
h
e
r
Arcotte s
studio is cons-
pact a nd bijou. so I -had
to sta nd on •
cha ir to ge t this shot
of them both
AMIGA COMPUTING
MARCH 1 J96
that is needed for the work the Amiga is best
at, like multimedia, video titling, non-linear
video editing and so on. Like most people
intimately concerned with the Amiga for their
Russell M oore - the ma n who ma de the
word e pk into an I rish household sensation
and computer art confounds them because
they can never possess it. I can make dozens
of copies, each exactly the same as the first
and that bugs them because they can't hoard
my art"
Tony took a roundabout trip into the world
of Amiga. He originally trained in sculpture
and comes from an orthodox fine art background.
But he wanted to get involved on the
emerging computer arts field and, through
speaking to a friend working at a production
facility in Belfast came into contact with the
Amiga. Tony's main problem as an artist is
one of funding, so the Amiga's low-cost
and high quality combination made for a
particularly attractive proposition.
He first got an A1500 about four years ago
and worked with Deluxe Paint and Imagine,
pretty standard Amiga tools that everyone
has access to. But two years ago, the ageing
A1500 was definitely starting to lag behind
the current state of the art (to be very kind to
it) and Tony replaced it with an A4000/030.
business, he is despondent about its
prospects over the next year, but hopes its
sorry situation can be turned around, it's not
a machine that can be sold in shops like
Dixons, or even the Estoril shops.
- that I an suggested
approach more like the old Apple
dealerships would be more appropriate, but
Russell wondered if there was even the
market for that
Even so, Arcom aren't averse to publicising
the Amiga in magazines like Ireland's influen
tial trade magazine, Irish Film g Video, with a
full page article on just how good LightWave
is. The only problem with doing this is the
worry that people will actually believe the article
and go out and buy Amigas and compete
with the services Arcom provides.
'The Amiga is the world's best-kept secret.
and we'd rather keep it that way," says
Russell
He continued using a mixture of video grabs
from his Vidi Amiga frame grabber and an
evolving mixture of Imagine. DPaint and
ImageF/X.
When Light Wove became available as a
standalone package, Tony got the necessary
money together in order to purchase what
was universally acclaimed as a brilliant
'new' tool for 3D animators. Six months ago.
he gave LightWave the kick in the pants it
needed by adding a Cyberstorm 060 boom
to his setup, thanks to a grant from the Arts
Council, but he has his eye on plenty of
other additions to his setup that he will
make when he gets further money - iterm
like a Stab Motion come pretty high on his
list. As you'll see from the pictures on the
page, Tony uses stark imagery to make his
point. He feels that colour can sometimes be
a distraction, and that computer art in
particular seems always to be oversaturated
with bright tones that can get in the way of
the point of the image