Above image: Still, Film with Three Dancers, 1970, 16mm by Ed Emschwiller

If Ed Emschwiller had only been a comic book illustrator, he would have been remembered as one of the greatest ever, producing hundreds of covers for America’s leading sci-fi titles throughout the 1950s.

As it happened, illustration was just the first step in what was to be a shape-shifting career of painting, cinematography, film, animation and teaching, all of which were characterised by an experimental approach and refusal to stand still. A new book pays tribute to this pioneering and under-appreciated career of one of the first-ever video artists.

Emschwiller, or EMSH – one of his many aliases – left the US army after the Second World War to pursue an interest in fine art that had earned him the reputation of ‘doodler’ among his fellow troops. Pencil drawings from those early service days – spent first in Fort Benning, Georgia and then Trieste, Italy – are steeped in mid-century machismo: nudity, pin-up girls and scenes of conflict. Signs of his love for science-fiction are there too, and parallels can be found between his early sketches and later work for pulp magazines.

Despite being one of the industry’s leading illustrators (he won five Hugo Awards), Emschwiller sought to cultivate his own ideas, beyond commissions and illustration altogether. The late 1950s saw Emschwiller begin his journey into filmmaking, enveloping himself in the New York-based collectives of avant-garde filmmakers known as New American Cinema and Cinema 16, headed by the legendary Jonas Mekas and Amos Vogel, respectively. Combined with his background in illustration, the techniques he picked up during this period provided the tools to become one of the first video artists, blazing a trail that is often overlooked in the history of American visual art.

With his first film, Dance Chromatic, in 1959, Emschwiller produced something which had scarcely been seen before. A young dancer, Nancy Fenster, shimmied between on-screen illustrations, back-dropped against expressive paintings and moving with perfect synchronicity to the lines Emschwiller had spent months meticulously plotting. This confluence of illustration, dance choreography, digital graphics and a philosophical interest in the inter-connectedness of our universe would dominate Emschwiller’s diverse repertoire over the next three decades.

With the onset of video and computer technology, Emschwiller’s relentless drive to break new ground was given new fuel and a new set of opportunities. Alongside the likes of Joan Jonas, Nam June Paik and Bill Viola, he accessed these nascent technologies via the experimental TV Lab program at US television station WNET/THIRTEEN. Alongside his contemporaries, Emschwiller helped produce some of the most groundbreaking television productions of the 1970s, including Scape-Mates (1972) and Self Trio (1976), which pioneered the earliest forms of CGI.

Given the breadth of Emschwiller’s work, from popular illustrations for mainstream magazines to avante-garde film that pushed the medium into unexplored territory (and an eleven year period as dean of CalArts film department), pinpointing the precise nature of his legacy is no easy task. What remains unequivocal however, are his indelible contributions to digital art that would come to form the blueprint for a new world of ubiquitous computer generate imagery. Having died in 1990, Emschwiller never got to see the influence of his career but with the release of this new book, his work is now ripe for rediscovery.

Dream Dance: The Art of Ed Emschwiller is published by Anthology Editions and is available for purchase here.