Charles A. Csuri

Pioneer in digital fine art and computer animation, Csuri was best known for pioneering the field of computer graphics, computer animation, and digital fine art, creating his first computer art in 1964. He has been recognized as the father of digital art and computer animation by the Smithsonian. In 1964, when he decided to turn the computer into an artist's tool, the computer confronting him was a huge mainframe that required the entry of its data through punched cards. He had to become a programmer to talk to it.

Until his later years, Csuri was not making any art, except in his mind; he was developing the programs he needed to make the art he imagined. Although there were by then some powerful paint programs that allowed artists to draw on a touch-sensitive tablet and watch their work appear on the screen while the computer provided a choice of brushstrokes and colors, he largely forewent this more direct interaction with the computer. Instead, Csuri continued to type away in the arcane jargons of computer languages, scripts, codes, and menu selections, using a sophisticated computer that let him sculpt images in three dimensions, set them in motion, and alter them in ways that often blurred the distinctions between special effects and art. Yet, as he pointed out, "even though we have all this marvelous technology, you still need to have an esthetic sensibility; you need a sense of culture and history (for the image to work as art). That has not changed."

Born in Grant Town, West Virginia, Csuri was a World War II veteran, having served his country from 1943–1946. In 1945 he received the Bronze Star for heroism in the Battle of the Bulge. After WWII, he returned to Ohio State to complete his M.A. degree in Art in 1948. In 1949 he joined the faculty of the Department of Art at The Ohio State University.

In 1978 Csuri became a Professor of Art Education and in 1986 a Professor of Computer Information Science. He remained a Professor Emeritus at The Advanced Computing Center for Art and Design at The Ohio State University. Between 1971 and 1987, while a senior Professor at Ohio State University, he founded the Computer Graphics Research Group, the Ohio Super Computer Graphics Project, and the Advanced Computing Center for Art and Design, dedicated to the development of digital art and computer animation. He was also co-founder of Cranston/Csuri Productions (CCP), one of the world's first computer animation production companies.

In 2000 Csuri received both the Governor's Award for the Arts for the best individual artist and The Ohio State University Sullivant Award—that institution's highest honor—in acknowledgment of his lifetime achievements in the fields of digital art and computer animation. His exhibition "Beyond Boundaries" was a retrospective of seventy of his most groundbreaking works of computer art, scheduled to travel to museums in Europe and Asia. He was the founder of Ohio State's celebrated research center, The Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design (ACCAD). Csuri was acknowledged as a leading pioneer of computer animation by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and The Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group Graphics (ACM SIGGRAPH).

He was inducted into the Football Hall of Fame as M.V.P. in the Big Ten Conference and served as captain of The Ohio State University's first national championship football team in 1942. He was a 16th round selection (154th overall pick) in the 1944 NFL Draft by the Chicago Cardinals.