David Em

David Em moved with his family from Los Angeles to South America in 1953, when he was one year old. He attended high school on the East Coast of the United States, where he started to draw seriously. In 1972, Em returned to California to set up his first art studio in San Francisco, where he started to work with analog video synthesizers. In 1974, he heard the word “digital” for the first time and, in the following year, created his first digital artworks at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). In 1976, by which time he was completely immersed in experimental digital art, Em built articulated 3D creatures with mainframe computers at Information International Incorporated (Triple-I). Between 1977 and 1988, he was the Artist in Residence at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and at the California Institute of Technology, where he produced generative artworks and virtual worlds. While at JPL, he co-produced the 1981 SIGGRAPH Frame Buffer Show show in Dallas, where 3D pixel images, including Escher (1979), were exhibited electronically for the first time. In 1991, Em worked with personal computers at Apple’s Advanced Technology Group (ATG) — his first contact with commercial imaging software — creating images that were radically different from those at JPL. In 1995, he built a network of personal computers to push the frontiers of digital art independently in his own studio. Today, in images such as Kurie (2024), Em manifests the infinite potential of the digital medium with generative AI, an evolutionary development that he predicted in 1977 would fundamentally transform the future of art.

From , June 2026