Technology for digital art has come a long way since the 1980s. But in these days of AI-driven software, a surprisingly retro tool is making a bit of a comeback.
Launched in 1981, the Quantel Paintbox was an all-in-one machine comprising a tablet, pressure-sensitive pen, a display and its own proprietary software. Priced at $250,000 (over $800,000 today), it was a lot more expensive than a Creative Cloud subscription with the epic Adobe Black Friday sale. But this groundbreaking tech revolutionised television graphics in the 1980s. Now it's getting the tribute it deserve in the form of a dedicated touring exhibition.
The Quantel Paintbox was mainly used by big TV networks – including to create the iconic MTV logo. But it was also used to make the first CGI music video, Money for Nothing by Dire Straits, iconic album covers like Nirvana’s Nevermind and movie posters for The Silence of the Lambs, Pulp Fiction and JFK.
Keith Haring experimented with the Paintbox in 1985. And in 1987, the BBC commissioned artists like David Hockney, Howard Hodgkin and Richard Hamilton to create digital artworks using the Paintbox for the Painting with Light documentary series.
ArtMeta, an art fair for digital art and NFTs, has now announced the Paintboxed - Tezos World Tour, a series of interactive events that will kick off with PepeFest Presents: Fake Basel 2024 at Modern Art Theory during Art Basel Miami Beach from 5 to 7 December.
Selected artists will be invited to create new digital artworks using one of the few remaining Paintbox devices in existence These will subsequently be minted as NFTs on objkt.com, powered by the Tezos blockchain. Following Miami, the tour will make stops in Paris, London, and New York. It will culminate in Basel, Switzerland in June 2025, where ArtMeta will host a retrospective as part of the Digital Art Mile art fair.
"With the Paintboxed - Tezos World Tour, ArtMeta and the Tezos community are bringing this pivotal piece of digital art history back into the spotlight," ArtMeta say. The exhibition was made possible through loans from the extensive archive of artworks and memorabilia of artist and historian Adrian Wilson’s collection.
Georg Bak, co-founder and artististic director at ArtMeta, said: “The Quantel Paintbox was a groundbreaking innovation in the 1980s when the personal computers were entering the market. Our visual culture in music, broadcasting and art was highly influenced by the Quantel Paintbox and many world famous artists who were not necessarily associated with digital art used it to create digital artworks."
It's not the first recent exhibition dedicated to the Paintbox. Last year, the photographer Adrian Wilson tracked down 20 works created on the device to show at an exhibition hosted by the Computer Arts Society called 'How Quantel’s Paintbox Changed Our World', in Leicester.
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