Author Venable Lyn

work by Leo and Diane Dillon. Emshwiller's footage of Bob Dylan singing "Only a Pawn in Their Game" on July 6, 1963 at a Voters' Registration Rally in Greenwood, Mississippi appears in D. A. Pennebaker's film of Dylan, Dont Look Back, in addition to his own film, The Streets of Greenwood (1962). In 1964 a Ford Foundation grant allowed Emshwiller to pursue his interest in film. Active in the New American Cinema movement of the 1960s and early 1970s, he created multimedia performance pieces, painted in China and did cine-dance and experimental films, while also working as a cinematographer on low-budget features and documentaries. His films of the 1960s were mostly shot in 16mm color, and some of these included double exposures created simply by rewinding the cameras. Beginning with Scape-Mates (1972) he shifted to experiments in video, combining computer animation with live-action. In 1979 he produced Sunstone, a ground-breaking three-minute 3-D computer-generated movie made at the New York Institute of Technology with Alvy Ray Smith. After a period as artist-in-residence at the Television Laboratory WNET/13 (New York), he moved to California and served as dean of the School of Film/Video at the California Institute of Arts from 1979 to 1990. He also served as provost from 1981 through 1986. In 1987 he created Hungers for the 1987 Los Angeles Arts Festival, in partnership with composer Morton Subotnick. It was his last completed work, Hunger, presented in October 1989 at the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, Austria. Emshwiller died of cancer on July 27, 1990, in Valencia, California, where he was cremated. His papers are archived at the California Institute of Arts. On June 16, 2007, Emshwiller was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in Seattle. In 2007, Nonstop Press published Emshwiller: Infinity X Two: The Art & Life of Ed and Carol Emshwiller by Luis Ortiz with a foreword by Alex Eisenstein, who also captioned the selected artwork.