LMSP7.PCX

In the fall of 1986, Lee Mullican began participation in UCLA’s Advanced Design Research Center’s Program for Technology in the Arts. The program allowed the then 66-year-old artist to expand his vast oeuvre to the digital. He found inspiration in the similarities between his painting style and a computerized matrix. Replacing his brush and signature palette knife striations with a clickable mouse and pen-like stylus, Mullican merged the late Surrealist method of automatism with the computer’s instant and precise replication of marks, stating; “I found that beyond what one thought, the computer as being hard-lined, analytical, and predictable, it was indeed a medium fueled with the automatic, enabled by chance, and accident, discovery of new ways of making imagery.”
The artworks in LeeMullican.PCX were originally created in PC Paintbrush and saved as PCX files. PCX stands for “Picture Exchange”, which is a Paintbrush Bitmap image format developed by ZSoft Corporation. It was developed as one of the initial bitmap image formats for DOS and Windows, supporting 24-bit true color images, 1-bit black and white images, 8-bit grayscale and indexed color images. Widely used as the imaging standard on the DOS platform, this raster image format also served as the native file format for PC Paintbrush. Although PCX image format has been replaced by newer formats like PNG and BMP, it’s still used by fax and scanning applications. The original PCX file for this work is included in your collector package.

When Lee made these works they were saved on 5 ¼ inch floppy discs. The technology at the time did not allow artists like Lee to easily search through files, so Lee documented his digital pieces by taking 35mm photographs of his individual pieces and produced slides from the photos. These archived 35mm slides were used as reference material to format the artworks in this exhibition, and scans of these slides are included in the downloadable content unlocked with the purchase of this NFT.

As you explore the original art file and slide you will see that these works were made on larger white backgrounds. These backgrounds have been cropped so the artwork better fits your screen, but no graphic information has been lost.