George Legrady
Canadian, 1950-

Jennings, 1987
inkjet print
23 5/8 × 28 5/8 in.

SBMA, Museum Purchase with funds provided by The Dana & Albert R. Broccoli Charitable Foundation and PhotoFutures
2017.32.1



Photo by Olivia Harris, n.d.

“Given that critical decisions are made at the conceptual, aesthetic and software design level, the ideal is to be conversant in both.” - George Legrady

COMMENTS

The 1980s Jetgraphix works-on-paper

With the introduction of the Truevision Targa high-resolution photographic, 32768 color, analog-to-digital imaging system in the mid 1980s, I realized over a 4 year period a series of digital photographic images exploring the potential of software processing in the study of the pixel-based image and its relation to noise and signal.

Ideas and themes explored were informed by:
• Conceptual Art: rule-based processes which led to software development as a creative practice
• Information Theory’s various definitions of communication such as entropy and redundancy, and differentiating signal as ordered information from noise as random information
• A semiotic exploration of the visual staging of television broadcast news
• The transformation of the photographic image into a digital syntax-based construct

These resulted in a series of 57 distinct compositions, and approximately 98 actual prints, possibly the first such digital photographic-based works transferred digitally to a prototype printer, the Fuji Jetgraphix system at a lab near UCLA.

https://www.mat.ucsb.edu/g.legrady/glWeb/publications/p/1980sJetgraphixOPT.pdf


UCSB’s Media Arts Czar Named Guggenheim Fellow

George Legrady, chair of UCSB’s Media Arts and Technology (MAT) doctoral program, has recently been named a Guggenheim Fellow. Out of the 3,000 applicants considered for disciplines like natural sciences, visual arts, cinema, and musical composition, Legrady was one of 178 to receive this year’s fellowships. To be considered, one must first produce advanced creative material in the arts, as well as show exceptional promise for a creative scholarship.

Born in Budapest, Hungary, Legrady grew up in Montreal, Canada until he moved to California to pursue a master of fine arts degree in photography from the San Francisco Art Institute.

Although Legrady began in the field of fine arts photography, he transitioned to digital technologies in the mid-1980s. Now he’s considered a new-media pioneer. His work focuses on photographic-based media, interactive digital media installations, and computationally generated visualizations. The integration of digital processes in his work has expanded his horizon and allowed him to investigate methodologies for new forms of visualization. His pieces are often products of self-organizing systems combined with algorithmically generated visualizations intended to serve as sociocultural narratives. …

https://www.independent.com/news/2016/may/07/ucsbs-media-arts-czar-named-guggenheim-fellow/

SBMA CURATORIAL LABELS

George Legrady, Distinguished Professor of Interactive Media in the Media Arts and Technology Graduate Program and the Department of Art at the University of California, Santa Barbara, was among the first artists to have successfully used the computer to create media-based, electronically-derived works that crossed the boundaries between newly developed technology and the fine arts. Harnessing digital computer language for its expressive rather than its solely technical functions and capabilities in the mid-1980s, Legrady lifted images from network television, and used code that he wrote to break down and rearrange the electronic image information he captured. The result, as seen in these four works from the “News” series, is a masterful disruption of a common broadcast scene in which four newscasters (the proverbial “talking heads”) are seen as ghostly absent and/or headless figures. Legrady’s striking investigations into media transmission prompt us to question how images are constructed via technology that has only grown more sophisticated, and more personally, socially, and politically pervasive.

- A Brilliant Spectrum, 2019