Sunstone, the innovative three-minute 3-D computer work from 1979 was created at the New York Institute of Technology with Alvy Ray Smith.

Sunstone, 1979.

In 1966 Emshwiller's 40-miinute film Relativity meditates on the place of man in the cosmos, using clever photographic effects to suggest vast interstellar distances in parallel to restlessly-moving closeups of a human body.

Despite a lack of subtlety in video and computer technology, Emshwiller managed to make several highly-praised productions, including the hour-long Pilobolus and Joan, and a multiple-monitor installation Slivers at the New York gallery The Kitchen (1977). His 1979 pioneer 3-D computer animation Sunstone proved a genuine artistic breakthrough, with a technological subtlety of color and shape that gave the 3-minute metamorphosis of a face and a cube real charm, quite aside from its novelty. In the 1980s, he concentrated more on multi-technology interface and live electronic performances, including the 1984 Skin Matrix which consisted of computer modifications of live-action images, and the 1987 interactive opera (composed with Morton Subotnik) Hungers, in which 16 video monitors as well as live singers, musicians and dancers are fed through a computer sensitive to the audience movement and responses, which then alters the images accordingly. Performances of this massive, technologically intricate Hungers at the Los Angeles Festival and Ars Electronica resembled nothing more than Emsh's early science-fiction illustrations of fantastic futures.

source: iotacenter.org