Ed Emshwiller

Edmund Alexander Emshwiller (February 16, 1925 – July 27, 1990) was an American visual artist notable for his science fiction illustrations and his pioneering experimental films.

Thanatopsis (1962), featuring brother Mac Emshwiller and sharing the title with William Cullen Bryant's 1817 poem,[6] was his first five-minute film.

Active in the New American Cinema movement of the 1960s and early 1970s, he created multimedia performance pieces and did cine-dance and experimental films, such as the 38-minute Relativity (1966).

[7] He also was a cinematographer on documentaries, such as Emile de Antonio's Painters Painting (1972), and feature films, such as Time of the Heathen (1962) and Adolfas Mekas' Hallelujah the Hills (1963).

In 1979, he produced Sunstone, a groundbreaking three-minute 3-D computer-generated video made at the New York Institute of Technology with Alvy Ray Smith.

In 1979, it was shown on WNET's Video/Film Review, and a Sunstone frame was used on the front cover of Fundamentals of Interactive Computer Graphics, published in 1982 by Addison-Wesley.

[10] In 1987, he created his electronic video opera Hunger for the 1987 Los Angeles Arts Festival, in partnership with composer Morton Subotnick.

A frame from Ed Emshwiller's video Sunstone (1979) was used on the front cover of this 1982 book published by Addison-Wesley.
Cover of World Without Men by Charles Eric Maine – illustration by Ed Emshwiller – Ace Books , 1958