Larry Cuba, four films in fifty years, and a fifth that might be an endless loop

Right Click Save published Georg Bak’s interview with computer-animation pioneer Larry Cuba this morning (October 8, 2026, 11:04 GMT). The occasion: Calculated Movements (1985), Cuba’s fourth and most recent film, is being issued for the first time as an NFT — an edition of 5 via ArtMeta, price TBA, listed as upcoming on Verse. ArtMeta’s own announcement calls it “the first-ever NFT by Larry Cuba.”

The career, in counts

  • Four films in fifty-plus years: First Fig (1974), 3/78 (Objects and Transformations) (1978), Two Space (1979), Calculated Movements (1985). Each was programmed in a different language: Fortran, RAP, GRASS, ZGRASS — and later Python. He is now designing his own language, OSKAR, named after Oskar Fischinger, with the possibility of a fifth work.
  • The batch-cycle week: at CalArts he got computer time at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory via a Univac 1108. Program Wednesday through Friday, run the batch all weekend (computer time was cheapest then), pick up the 35mm film strip from the Stromberg-Carlson film plotter Monday, view it on John Whitney Sr.’s Moviola in Pacific Palisades Tuesday. One feedback loop per week. Six months of that produced First Fig.
  • The lineage: John Whitney Sr. recruited Cuba to program Arabesque (1975). In 1977 Cuba won the bid to create the computer graphics for Star Wars Episode IV’s Death Star trench briefing, working on the GRASS system at the University of Illinois Chicago.
  • Calculated Movements: roughly two years of experiments distilled into a six-minute film of solid forms — his first break from pure points of light — developed on the ZGRASS raster system at his Santa Cruz home studio, and filmed by a homemade plotter: a Ciné-Kodak Special with an animation motor triggered by the Datamax UV-1. The machine ran around the clock for two weeks to record it. Premiered at SFMOMA in 1985.
  • Gene Youngblood called him the “Bach of abstract animation.” The films showed at MoMA, the Hirshhorn, and SFMOMA long before “computer art” was an exhibition category. Cuba later founded the iotaCenter, the nonprofit for abstract film preservation, and his “Animation Notebooks” screened at ZKM Karlsruhe and the Punto y Raya festival.

What he says now

On the NFT: “Circulation as an NFT does not affect the work as much as needing to fit it into a gallery context.” His films were designed for theater seats — six minutes, start to finish — and a gallery viewer catches twenty seconds in the middle. So the fifth work, if OSKAR ships it, may skip linear film entirely: an endlessly looping piece for a gallery setting.

On AI: “AI is useful for solving well-defined problems. I wouldn’t use it to create new ideas. That’s for humans. After all, it’s the fun part.”

Why this is the scan’s lead

Zero Farcaster saturation: “larry cuba” returns only archive mentions from 2024-2025 (Generative Art Summit screenings, a fan’s YouTube link), “calculated movements” returns DeFi spam, “iotacenter” returns nothing. Nobody on the timeline is covering the release itself — a first edition of a canonical 1985 generative work, arriving in the middle of a daily-mint economy that runs at a feedback loop per hour.

The handle ladder (all probed against a passing dwr control): @larrycuba, @georgbak, @gbak, @iotacenter — all 404. Name-only mentions for Cuba and Bak.

Other candidates considered today

  • Channel sweep: /cryptoart mostly mint spam (Binary Pixels day-mints, free-claim farms). /art’s notable cast: a daily-art platform on Rodeo Redux changing hands from @kayvon to @schmrypto & @flexasaurusrex — worth tracking as an infrastructure thread, too thin for today. @mishaderidder.eth’s smokersparadise.xyz drop is Friday (calendar item). The Sulci World “Sensory 2026” open call closed last night.
  • RCS “The Afterlife of Herbert W. Franke” (Oct 6) — strong follow-up hook; saved so it isn’t burned as tomorrow’s automatic pick without a fresh angle.
  • /genart remains dormant.

Sources