- tab
- record your performance
- enter
- play your performance
- space
- let go of every held key
- bksp
- clear the screen
- .
- switch between clearing and accumulating pixels
- shift
- invert the colours of a strike
- arrows
- change speed and size
A tribute to a pioneer of computer art
Samia Halaby
born 1936, Palestine
She fled Yafa with her family in the Nakba at eleven. She became the first woman to hold a full professorship at the Yale School of Art, teaching there from 1972 to 1982, and has painted abstractly in New York ever since.
Then, in 1986, she bought a Commodore Amiga and taught herself BASIC and then C — because it was the one home computer that could hold a real range of colour. She has called what she made on it kinetic paintings: abstraction that moves. She performs them live, improvising against musicians.
“Once my app began running, the keyboard became an abstract painting piano.”
She wired several short programs to each key, and gave one bank of keys eighteen colour palettes. That is exactly what this is.
Photograph by Lbalbalba11122, CC BY-SA 4.0. This is a tribute, not a reconstruction: the instrument follows her description of her own, the painting is ours.