Historical Perspective of the iPhone New Yorker Cover

By Mark Kaufman

Day after day, me, you and everyone you know sits in front of a computer screen, tiptaptapping away, writing, creating art, researching and goofing off. This week Jorge Columbo created a New Yorker cover with an iPhone! An iPhone. As amazing as that is and you can find a video here of the process, that got me to thinking about how cool and amazing the software is that allowed that to happen, and how far we have come in the history of computer art. Along with the New Yorker cover above are some examples going back over 50 years to the infancy of comuter generated art, and an example of one of the first computer “tablets”. Needless to say it was inconceivable in the 1950s and 60s that you could take a room full of Univac computers to the streets of New York and create art. Go here for a history of computer graphics.