Generative Art Timeline · Chapter 6: Personal Computer Era (1980s)
1984
Cubicomp Picture Maker

From 1984 to 1988, Cubicomp specialized in computer-aided design (CAD) software and played a pivotal role in the development of 3D computer graphics on the personal computer. Cubicomp’s PictureMaker and ModelMaker software was instrumental in revolutionizing how artists and designers created and visualized complex 3D models. Additionally, Picture Maker was some of the earliest PC-based 3D animation software and was used by artists such as Victor Acevedo. He used the Cubicomp to create works including Wired Couple Series (1989-1990), 6.26.27.86 (1989-1991) and Tell Me the Truth (1989-1990), which entered the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2008 as part of the Patric Prince gift, the museum dating the print it holds to 1991. Acevedo spoke to Peter Bauman (Monk Antony) about Cubicomp, saying: “After my early experiments with algorithmic computer graphics in 1983 and 1984, in early 1985, I moved to the Cubicomp system because I could interactively and visually build polyhedral models, combine them with digitized photographs and animate image sequences. I wanted to expand on the type of hybrid geometrical imagery that I had developed with traditional analog media in the years 1977–1984.”
Text by Peter Bauman. Generative Art Timeline, Le Random, fact-checked September 2026.
People
Movements
Technology and Art
Filed under
- Ideas
- Technology and Art
- Technologies
- 3D animation, 3D modeling, 3D models, computer graphics, computer-aided design, ModelMaker, PictureMaker
- People
- Patric Prince, Victor Acevedo
- Works
- Tell Me the Truth, Wired Couple Series
- Organisations
- Cubicomp, Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), Wired
Echoes across time
- 1968 · Computer Graphic Exhibition at Brno House of Arts
- 1968 · The machine, as seen at the end of the mechanical age at MoMA
- 1951 · Edmund C. Berkeley Begins Publishing Computers and Automation