David Em:

We live in confusing times.

Books do not look like books. They sometimes resemble computer chips. This makes for a slight misalignment among some readers who refuse to pick up a computer chip to try to turn the pages.

In the field of art a semipanic spreads. Artists, like many another in other fields, fear that the machine is here to mash their toes, chop their fingers, or put out their eyes.

The computer lurks with intention to loom. Men run down the middle of the streets crying, "The dam has broke!" forgetting they live in a town with no water and no dam.

Have you or have you not heard it said that the day is fast coming when the artists will be replaced by a robot. We will all retire from the field and leave the computer as mindless Michelangelo inside the church painting the far wall and the upper ceiling. When God reaches down his Great Hand it will not touch Adam, it will touch Apple or Commodore or the Xerox Mark 10.

It's enough to make a chap turn in his oils and burn his canvases.

And yet. And yet...

David Em

David Em studied film directing at the American Film Institute, and painting at the Pennsylvania Academy. His computer-generated creationshave beenbroadcast on network television in America, Europe, and Japan, and exhibited in museums such as the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Madrid, and the Seibu Museum in Tokyo.

His work has been profiled in many books and magazines, including Newsweek,The Encyclopedia Britannica, Forbes, Mondo 2000, Omni, Der Spiegel,Smithsonian, and Gardner's Art Through the Ages. Harry N. Abrams haspublished a book on his computer worlds titled The Art of David Em with aforeword by David Ross, the Director of the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Em has given talks about his work at Harvard, MIT, the University of Paris,USC Film School, Siggraph, Nicograph, Imagina, Cal Arts, Disney, the AAAS,and many other organizations. He was the Artist in Residence at the JetPropulsion Lab (JPL) for ten years, and a Faculty Associate at Cal Tech forfour years.

Em has consulted and produced projects in collaboration with companies suchas Apple,, Hewlett Packard, CBS Records (covers for Herbie Hancock's threedigital albums), Universal Studios, Interplay, Canal Plus, Canon , Kodak ,and Polaroid.

Currently, Em works in his own studio with desktop PCs. In his spare time,he studies Maya hieroglyphs.

His work was influenced by the works of Vermeer, Velazquez, Brueghel, O'Keefe, Ernst, Warhol, Whitney Sr.