In 1977, NASA opened the Computer Graphics Lab at its Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California with the aim of enabling scientific research for its spaceflight operations. The same year, the lab’s founding director Robert Holzman invited David Em to be the first artist in residence.

‘Aku’ was made using a suite of 3D apps developed by the American computer scientist Jim Blinn whilst he was a graduate student in the University of Utah (1974 to 1977) and was researching on realistic rendering. The apps Blinn built were some of the most advanced 3D tools at that time.

Em created ‘Aku’ on May 10th, 1978, during a quiet evening when all the lab crew had gone home, including the astrophysicists, spacecraft engineers, computer system operators, project managers and their staff. That night, he found an image that Blinn had produced utilising a rivet texture created by Lance Williams at the New York Institute of Technology. Blinn was working on the image for the 1978 ACM SIGGRAPH Conference to introduce the ‘bump mapped’ technique which allowed users to integrate raised textures into 3D elements to make them appear more realistic.

‘Aku’ is Em’s first visualisation of a digital 3D world and the first print (Type R) ever produced from his digital artwork. The virtual space represented in ‘Aku’ was composed using 3D modelling, pixel matrix projections and digital painting. The work contains 3D elements, but it isn’t a complete virtual world.

This edition from the V&A digital art collection was commissioned by Robert Holzman. Holzman (1935-2020) was married to the American art historian and collector Patric Prince (1942-2021). ‘Aku’ was part of Patric Prince’s collection which was acquired by the V&A in 2008, alongside her archive.

For related works by David Em see object E.952-2008