In this section: Intro Vaudeville and Music Hall The First Stars The Challenge of the Air The Picture Palace4 The Light Fantastic
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Computer graphics, computer-aided design, lasers and video technology came together in the 1980s to create a new visual world, in which the new possibilities of electronics were enthusiastically celebrated, and the imagination stimulated by the sheer power of the silicon chip.
The development of video technology, with its simple techniques of stopping the image, recoloring it, inverting or distorting it, digitizing it and easily intercutting it, provided pop music with a visual counterpart to the ephemeral, studio-created three-minute single; and the pop video became the new expressive form of the 1980s.
Meanwhile, a combination of silicon-chip logic and video graphics had created a multitude of simple, bounded but highly seductive alternative worlds, to be reached for the price of a small coin in any video parlor around the world. The programmers created universes in which dragons sat on hidden treasure, voracious monsters pursued you around mazes and aliens attacked in ever more exotic space ships. The iconography of the B-movie and the cartoon comic reigned supreme, though often modulated by a quirky sense of self-deprecating humor.
Computer graphics were turned to far more serious ends in all kinds of industrial uses, yet they became omnipresent, particularly in high-profile graphics such as television company logos and ads. The possibility of producing solid three-dimensional images, through computer graphics or through holography, which could produce a free-standing 3-D image, added new opportunities. Film producers experimented with ways of integrating the conventional photograph with the new image.
Finally, the new imagery was used simply for visual delight. Light shows became an essential element in tourist attractions throughout Europe and America, and the laser beam, with its pencil-thin beams of intensely colored light, was used to more and more grandiose effect in rock concerts. As musicians such as Jean-Michel Jarre developed greater sophistication in the use of computer technology within their music, they found ways of combining sound and light into enormous spectaculars.
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