Jane Veeder

Jane Veeder is an artist-programmer, filmmaker, and professor at San Francisco State University in the Department of Design and Industry. While Jane Veeder is best known for her work in computer graphics, she has also worked extensively with traditional art forms such as painting, ceramics, and theatre.

Veeder moved away from traditional art making and began her work in the digital arts in 1976. Her video 'Montanna' lead her to become the first computer graphic artist to have their work featured in the video collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Her video work typically involves working with a computer to create the images, rather than a video recorder, to achieve a more direct relationship between the artist and the piece. Many pieces are meant to involve participation between the viewer and the work itself. Veeder's work marks some of the significant steps that took digital technology into the fine arts, which never had been done previously.

Veeder moved from California to the neighborhood of Pilsen, Chicago in the early 1970s to pursue her graduate degree at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). It was there, in 1976, she first met Phil Morton, the founder of the Video Department at SAIC. Soon after meeting, their individual art practices become influenced heavily by the other. New technologies and artistic communities were emerging at this time. Their collaboration resulted in them creating a number of programs from scratch.

Veeder's knowledge of photography lead her to experiment with video art, eventually working across multiple program platforms. These included Bally Home Computer/Arcade, and ZGRASS computer language which was eventually combined with Sandin Image Processor. The burgeoning professional video game industry in Chicago gave Veeder an outlet to put her theories into practice. Images produced in these early programs can alter an image directly on the screen, changing its size, torsion, color and texture.

Veeder collaborated with Phil Morton to create the video art pieces "Program #7" and "Program #9" in 1978.

Veeder lectured on the importance of collaboration and play at the Museum of Modern Art, two years before her involvement in the 1988 SIGGRAPH Exhibition of Computer Art.