 The first art object I remember making, I took a cigar box and then I cut out pieces of paper, one for a head and two for arms and two for legs. And I thought about that scar box as being Jesus and I put on a head and two arms and two legs on it. And then I took another piece of paper and I cut out squiggly things like this that I thought was intestines and I put into the cigar box and closed it. And that was one of my early works that ended up reflecting upon this, which has a little door in that opens up. I'll show you. What the heck? You can see. So I've been fascinated with, you know, heads, arms, things coming out of a box type of structures. There was an area called, underneath the furnaces, called the checkers. This was in the open hearth. And it was one summer and I was a student at Carnegie Mellon at the time and I worked for a summer in the steel mill. And so I was in a labor gang, open hearth labor gang. So we had to crawl into these checkers, which are meant to preserve heat, you understand, from the furnaces, with a drill that had a chain on it. And it would chain like this and knock stuff off the bricks that were there to hold heat. Now there were two gangs that did that and each one took about ten minutes. So one gang was in there working for ten minutes and they took them out and they put you in. You really had to take salt tablets so you wouldn't pass out because it was so hot. It was 90 degrees of the summertime outside and it felt cool when you walked outside. It actually felt cool. But when you're doing that in the checkers, it turns out that it was worse sitting there knowing that it was your turn to go in than it was being in there knowing that the time was running out for you to stay in the checkers. Some aspects of mathematics does appeal to me. I really like calculus because calculus has to do with the notion of infinity and it stirs up my imagination. But proving things, I can deal with it for a certain amount but I can't see my life doing that kind of stuff. So that kind of shook me up. So I was already familiar with what I could do in art and what art was about. I never thought about it as a means of making a living. So here I was in mathematics now and I flunked advanced calculus and tried to figure out what I was going to do and I started going over to the Wednesday night sketching sessions over there and I started looking around at what the students did. And there was one particular student who was very brilliant, actually his name was Steve Langfit and I was astounded by the drawings that he was doing. But nevertheless it enticed me so much that I thought, boy, I didn't even get involved with this. So that's what I did. So I became a freshman again and I was kind of an odd duck there because here I was, I was the guy with the briefcase and the slide roll going into the Fine Arts School, you know. But it was absolutely fascinating to me and in my freshman year I was doing better there than I was in mathematics actually. And besides they were calling me Dwayne and talking about my artwork and how it should go this way and it should go that way. And I just absolutely ate it up. This was for 3D design. And it was a project to use found materials. So what I did was I took windshield wipers, I took windshield wipers and I bent them into this shape and I took nylon stockings and I made the sculpture, found objects. Now this was a similar idea and again this had to do with windshield wipers. So I have two windshield wipers here and then I stretched some canvas between the windshield wipers to emphasize the curve that was naturally happening between the windshield wipers. And I was fascinated by surrealism and doing imagery that I didn't understand, in other words coming from my subconscious, and it didn't make sense to me. Now this is in antithesis to mathematics which you totally understand what you're doing and you have to prove everything to even understand it even better. But this is like allowing things to happen on a canvas that are dreamlike and you don't understand it. Back in my math program when I was there I took a class in programming and I didn't like it that much. It was okay but I learned how to program basically. But when I started becoming a freshman again in art then I found out there was a computer that was available. Just anybody can work with it if they liked. And we're talking about punch card computers. We're talking about punching out on cards, stacking up cards in a box, handing it to somebody who's wearing a white or light blue jacket behind a glass window in an air conditioned room with a computer. That's what computers were. And you hand a stack of cards in with your program and then you come back four hours later to pick it up and find out you made a typo. And then you have to retype that card or two cards, whatever you made a mistake, put it back together again, hand it to the guy and then four hours later maybe it would work. So I started working with that kind of a process and I kind of enjoyed it but when I was in student mathematics. But after I got out of mathematics I thought with computers in the sense I'm entertaining myself here with images that I can't predict and I'm putting it together I thought maybe I can write computer programs that would entertain me as much as what I'm doing with my subconscious. So I started trying to program the computer to make art. Now what was funny about that is that they were used to in the computer center of engineers doing problems and coming out with just text on a sheet of paper where here all of a sudden all of a sudden the computer stops typing on a printer and it thinks for a long time and then it goes and goes it does a line but it doesn't up space the page and then it goes again right on top of the text. So in a sense you would think that this is something that's broken that maybe the printer isn't working right because it does that four lines but that's how I do tonality was that I have N and X and Z and I over printed those on top of each other to make a solid or a gray tone in between and a lighter tone here and start making pictures like that. And the head of the computer center said he wasn't happy with this I mean he stopped this stuff from happening he says this is not normal and somehow I hooked up with and I don't know how this happened but I hooked up with Dr. Herbert Simon who was a professor there at the time who was a Nobel Laureate but he was a professor in AI artificial intelligence he was a professor in psychology he was a professor of the Graduate School of Industrial Administration he got his doctorate in political science and he got his Nobel Prize in economics. So he was a huge factor at the school he was he was writing programs to similarly Bach at the time so he saw he somehow he found out what I was doing I may have gone to him and asked him showed him some of the stuff that I was doing to see if he was interested at all but he took me under his wing then and then he started giving me support for this and we had sessions once a week and I took class I got class credit for it and he also got me also got it so that I got I got money during the summertime to do that there was enough money to pay for my tuition so I got a thousand dollars in the summertime to do this type of stuff oh yeah I threw I threw things away all the time what would it be I'll see what the results were and and then I would evaluate that we change the program a little bit and try to do better what what what it is is trying to increase the probability of good things happening see that's what I was working on so if I was noticing that it was drifting more toward bad things happening then I would try to change the probability of that happening