In 2007 a new documentary called The Pixar Story screened at the Mill Valley Film Festival. It covered the wild antics of the studio’s founders as they crafted a new kind of movie—a fully computer-animated picture bursting with riotous colors and textures, ultra-vivid characters, and plotlines subversively seeded with mind-expanding wisdom. During a panel discussion afterward, the interviewer asked a provocative question. “This might be crazy,” she began, “but is there any connection between the world of the counterculture and psychedelics, and Pixar?”
The panelists on stage—Ed Catmull and John Lasseter, both central to Pixar’s development—fell into an uncomfortable silence. Drugs and the counterculture are edgy subjects for employees of a Disney division beloved by generations of children. Finally, Lasseter said, “Is Alvy Ray Smith in the audience?”
If Smith, the bearded, boisterous Pixar cofounder, had gotten a chance to answer the question, he would have freely admitted that LSD helped set his creative direction, which in turn shaped both Pixar’s culture and its technology. He left the company just as it began making actual films, but every frame of those films owes something to Smith. He helped unleash the breakthroughs that allowed for movies to be generated entirely by code and algorithms. And in his work before and after Pixar, he made immense contributions to the first digital paint software, coding up features that transformed our ability to manipulate images.
But Smith’s presence in the back of the auditorium—and not on the stage—spoke to something else: the dissonance between his contributions and his fame. He’s a unique figure in both computer science and entertainment, bridging the eras of primitive line graphics on blinking oscillators and immersive virtual worlds made of dazzling computer imagery. All while, as Lasseter implied, injecting the ’60s Weltanschauung into everything he touched, much of which touches us still. Yet, despite a healthy ego and a raconteur’s élan, after Lasseter’s callout—and some laughter in the room—Smith stayed in his seat and said nothing.
Call it restraint. “As far as history goes, I feel like he got shafted, both in Pixar history and in computer graphics history in general,” says Pam Kerwin, a former Pixar colleague. “Everything that you currently use in Photoshop right now basically came from Alvy.” Even self-driving cars and augmented reality, “which are all about image processing, machine vision ... Alvy and his colleagues brought all that stuff into the world.”
But the 77-year-old’s mark is not limited to the past, and the world still has to do some catching up to him. This summer he finally stepped out, publishing A Biography of the Pixel, in which he lays out a grand unified theory of digital expression. Pixel is a deep and challenging tome in the spirit of Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, a winding tale of science, heroes, and tyrants, all leading to the moment, sometime around the beginning of our current century, when a long-predicted digital convergence coalesced. Almost all expression—visual, textual, audio, video, you name it—has moved to the machine world, which, perhaps counterintuitively, is no less real than our physical reality. And that is not a metaphorical equivalence. It is, Smith argues, literal.
He calls this second reality Digital Light, and it’s pretty much what all of us look at and listen to when we’re not in the middle of a forest. He didn’t coin the term—it was first uttered about a decade ago by a conference organizer who asked him to give a talk with that title. “It was a term that’s everything I wanted it to be,” he says, covering “all these different aspects of what people do with pixels.”
Digital Light, as he documents, emerged into the world through a long and twisted scientific process; it’s a picaresque tale with unexpected protagonists—Jean-Baptiste Joseph Fourier, Vladimir Kotelnikov, Alan Turing—whose lives he exhumes with the passion of an obsessive genealogist. Putting together their contributions on the nature of light, sampling, and computation, Smith makes a convincing case that there’s no difference between analog and digital reality. It’s a belief that he’s held for decades. Barbara Robertson, a computer graphics journalist, remembers sitting with him at a café and hearing him say, after a contemplative silence, “You, know, everything is just waves.”
Oh, and the subject of this biography, the pixel, is not what we generally think it is. Forget your misguided belief that a pixel is one of those tiny squares on your screen. Smith explains that the pixel is the product of a two-part process in which an element of some consciously created content is presented on some sort of display. Friends, you are not looking at pixels on your screen but the expression of those pixels. What you see is Digital Light. The pixel itself? That’s just an idea. Once you get this distinction, it’s clear that Digital Light is not a second-class reality. In the 21st century, it’s equal. “Just the simple idea of separating pixels from display elements is going to seem revolutionary to people who don’t understand the technology,” Robertson says.
This history of computer graphics is very much a shadow autobiography, which Smith launches at almost exactly the midpoint of the 560-page volume. He re-creates a scene where the famed sitar player Ravi Shankar visits Smith’s lab at Lucasfilm and is enchanted by the blooming of an algorithmically generated flower. “Allllllllvyyyyy!” Shankar cries in appreciation. From that moment, Smith appears as an unforgettable figure in the pixel’s saga, and he brings in the people who shaped him and almost killed him—Steve Jobs, George Lucas, and an obscure would-be animation pioneer named Alex Schure. As a participant in this revolution, Smith takes us to the turn of the new century, when we reach the precipice of digital convergence.
It took Alvy Ray Smith 10 years to produce the book. Or maybe 50. It depends on whether you date the work from the time he began writing it or just living it.
“At one point, I mentally wrote a screen-play about Alvy’s life, which I think actually would make a fantastic movie,” says Smith’s wife, Alison Gopnik, who met him well into act three. “The first scene you see is this New Mexico desert, and then there’s this little towheaded, blond kid. And there’s horses and cactuses around, and then you see one of the rockets from White Sands, right, appearing on the horizon. And he’s looking up at the rocket.” In truth, Smith, just under 2 years of age, was at home in Las Cruces when he says he heard the explosion from the 1945 Trinity atomic bomb test, 100 miles away. His dad was away at war; his parents had married and conceived him with the thought that they might never be reunited. But his father did return and took a job running a cattle feed business in the small town of Clovis, near the Texas panhandle.
Smith was a good student, with a particular talent for math. But he also loved spending time with an uncle who was a professional artist. Smith was the only person Uncle George allowed in his studio, and the boy silently observed how to stretch a canvas, mix oils and turpentine, and use pigments to bring life to a blank surface. He got a taste of computer programming while visiting scientists at the nearby White Sands Missile Range. At New Mexico State University he studied electrical engineering, and he headed to Stanford to study artificial intelligence. In California, he learned more than computers. “In the next year, my hair was down to here, and I was hanging out in Golden Gate Park and doing all the drugs and everything,” he says. After taking LSD, he says, “I realized that I could not be a programmer—I had to do something that had art in it.”
It would take him a while. He wound up studying cellular automata, self-reproducing digital organisms generated by rule-based systems. After his doctorate, Smith headed east, to New York City, for a teaching job. He designed a cellular automaton exercise that became the cover of the February 1971 issue of Scientific American. But while he reveled in the city’s pleasures, he found academia unsatisfying.
In December 1972, Smith was racing down a New Hampshire ski slope when his knit cap shifted and covered his face. (Later he discovered that a tag inside the cap read, “Knitted by a blind person.”) He didn’t see a second skier on the trail, who’d lost control and was headed directly for him. Smith suffered a nasty spiral fracture of his right femur. He spent the next three months in a full-body cast, nipples to toes. “I just thought nonstop, 15 hours a day, and rethought the world,” he says. He’d always been passionate about merging computers and art. But somehow, he’d lost the art. “I said, ‘Alvy, you’ve made a terrible mistake,’” he says.
He resigned his NYU post and headed back to California. He slept on people’s floors in Berkeley for a year and waited for something to happen. And it did. One day in May 1974, a friend, Richard Shoup, convinced him to come to his workplace, the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, where a team of computer scientists were reinventing computing on the dime of the copy machine giant. Shoup’s own project, called SuperPaint, was orthogonal to that effort, and not universally blessed. It was the first interactive color graphics program—basically a software paintbrush with a color TV display—that allowed users to create and manipulate images. Smith’s mind was blown as surely as if he’d dropped a tab of acid. He had discovered Digital Light. “I played with the program for 13 hours straight and didn’t want to leave,” he says. “This is the marriage of art and computers!”
At the time, full-color graphics on a computer were a rare thing. Producing even a single image required massive amounts of memory, known as a frame buffer. “To put a picture up on a display you had to buffer it in something, and that something might cost half a million bucks,” says Alan Kay, who was heading the personal computer effort at PARC. The research lab had a slow, grouchy frame buffer that made SuperPaint possible.
Smith realized that with SuperPaint and the frame buffer you could create animations. “We understood right away that you can make these things move,” he says. He began visiting the lab to make cinematic sequences, including a cartoon figure winking his eye and turning his eyeball. Smith was desperate to join PARC, but the lab wouldn’t hire him full-time. Finally, with Kay’s help, PARC executives figured out a low-risk way to retain him: They paid him through a purchase order, as if renting a piece of equipment. They contracted for 857 hours of “professional labor services.”
Soon, a video artist named David DiFrancesco started hanging out at the lab. Smith built a slick interface for Shoup’s system, essentially creating the first draft of the personal graphics programs that millions of people now take for granted. He used the software to make animations, and DiFrancesco filmed the images. It was a wonderful chaos.
Their idyll was short-lived. One day, a group of executives informed Smith and DiFrancesco that they were doubling down on black-and-white. They were phasing out SuperPaint. The Alvy Ray Smith purchase order was canceled.
But Smith had found his mission: to build the future of computer graphics. He and DiFrancesco piled into Smith’s white Ford Torino and blasted down the interstate to the unlikely mecca of the field, the University of Utah, in the hope of finding new jobs. Computer graphics researchers at Utah were focused more on functional applications, such as computer-aided design, and not the psychedelic painting approach that splashed color pixels on a screen. They didn’t hire Smith and DiFrancesco, but they did mention a recent Utah grad named Ed Catmull, who thought just like they did.
Not yet 30, Catmull believed in the then contrarian idea that computer graphics could revolutionize entertainment. Catmull had accepted a job at an unlikely place: the New York Institute of Technology. It sounds MIT-ish, but its reputation circa 1975 was something akin to a diploma mill. (Its standing has since improved.) Located on the north shore of Long Island, it owned a number of Gatsbyesque mansions. The maestro of this operation was Alex Schure, a self-described “education entrepreneur” with mysterious sources of income. Despite, or maybe because of, his constant denials that he wanted to be the next Walt Disney, people universally understood that Disneyhood was his goal. He was bankrolling a cartoon epic based on a children’s orchestral piece called Tubby the Tuba. He had a hundred animators on the project, and he was hoping Catmull might automate some of the process.
Tipped off by the Utah people, Catmull summoned Smith and DiFrancesco, who immediately flew to Long Island to join the group, which was stationed above a garage in one of the mansions. Catmull, a soft-spoken Mormon with a family, bonded instantly with Smith. “Alvy had a long black beard, with hair flying, but it didn’t matter, he was smart and engaging,” Catmull says. Best of all, Smith came to share Catmull’s passion for one day making a full-length feature film entirely with computer graphics. They called their dream The Movie.
Smith became Catmull’s de facto partner. Computer graphics at the time was a fringe stepchild of computer science, constrained by the limited power of relatively primitive machines. But they understood that what would soon become known as Moore’s law would change that, and they set about boosting their field to become a linchpin of computing and entertainment.
Schure went all in, eventually buying 18 frame buffers for hundreds of thousands of dollars. The fully equipped team began making short animated movies. Their foes were “jaggies,” the blocky edges you could see on poorly rendered objects. The antidote to the jaggies was a technique called anti-aliasing that required raw computer power and clever techniques to create denser graphics.
The extra buffers led Smith and Catmull to a major conceptual advance: the alpha channel. Alongside the three basic color channels of red, green, and blue, which combined in various ways to create full-color palettes, they added an element that controlled the transparency of pixels. By tweaking an object’s opacity over time, you could blur its motion and correct for the unpleasant staccato movements that spoiled early attempts at digital animation.
Once people started using the alpha channel, it seemed absurdly obvious. “If you tell somebody that Alvy invented the alpha channel, people don’t even know what that means, because alpha channel is just so fundamentally integrated into everything that happens with graphics,” says Glenn Entis, then a student taking classes at NYIT, who later cofounded the graphics company behind Shrek and Madagascar. Smith and his colleagues eventually won an Academy Award for the alpha channel, one of Smith’s two technical Oscars. (The other was shared with Shoup for SuperPaint.)
But in 1975, Smith and Catmull started to realize they were in the wrong place. Tubby the Tuba finally came out—and it was dead boring. “We had a screening in Manhattan, and several of the people there fell asleep,” Catmull says. Smith thought the lesson was clear: To make a great animated film, you needed more than great graphics. You needed a storyteller.
They decided to approach George Lucas. To avoid tipping off Schure, they made a clandestine sortie to a nearby office supply shop and rented a cast-iron manual typewriter. They banged out a letter offering Lucas their services. It worked: Over the next several months, several members of the lab took jobs at Lucasfilm in Marin County, California. It was the club to join, says Loren Carpenter, who signed on in 1980. “These were the people pushing the boundaries of algorithms,”
Lucas and Smith never resolved a basic disagreement. According to Smith, Lucas saw his graphics group as toolmakers, not moviemakers. It’s true that to create The Movie, scientists had to fashion amazing tools that could render reality in a convincing way. Smith and Catmull had an expansive vision for what those tools ought to be, including a virtual camera that would capture the images produced by computers. Lucas rejected the premise that you could shoot an entire movie inside a computer.
In 1982 an opportunity arose to apply the tools to an actual Hollywood movie. Lucasfilm was providing effects for Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, and the script had a scene in which Kirk and Spock watch, on a computer screen, a dead planet starting to bloom with organic life. The movie-within-a-movie was a perfect opportunity to inject computer graphics—which still couldn’t match the resolution of actual film—into a big-budget movie.
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The sequence, directed by Smith, became known as the Genesis effect. It showed a ship firing a torpedo at a planet to transform its barren surface into a verdant, Earth-like paradise. Smith made his virtual camera do a slick pirouette that could never have been done with a physical rig, a move he devised specifically to impress Lucas. Indeed, one day Lucas stuck his head into Smith’s office—Great camera move, he said. Not long after, the group’s special effects popped up in Return of the Jedi and Young Sherlock Holmes. Still, Lucas stuck to his position.
As the graphics group refined their techniques, they had to improve their hardware, and they designed their own imaging computer with built-in frame buffers. One day over lunch, while brainstorming a name for this device, Smith suggested a variation of laser—pixer, which had the flavor of a Spanish verb. Loren Carpenter tweaked it to pixar, which had a Jetsonesque feel to it. They all agreed that pixar was a cool name.
But they still dreamed of The Movie. In 1983, Smith began storyboarding a short, fully computer-generated movie of his own. He set a goal of finishing it within a year. The story—more like a vignette—involved an android named André coming to life in a forest. The Lucasfilm team jokingly referred to it as “My Breakfast With André,” referencing the two-hander with André Gregory and Wallace Shawn. Smith later told author Michael Rubin that he intended the android’s awakening to symbolize the rise of computer animation itself.
Later that year, Smith and Catmull went on a secret pilgrimage to meet with Disney executives, in hopes that The Movie could one day be made there. On that visit they met an impressive young animator named John Lasseter. Lasseter left Disney soon after, and Smith and Catmull pounced on the chance to hire him. Because Lucas didn’t want his computer scientists to make movies, they gave Lasseter the title “user interface designer.” He started working on the André short, making the hero more lifelike. And why not have a second character? Enter a bee, to annoy and ultimately pursue André. They named the newcomer Wally B, after Wallace Shawn. Lasseter’s contribution confirmed the revelation Smith had had at NYIT—the magic of a movie had to come from human creativity, from storytelling.
By all moviemaking measures, The Adventures of André and Wally B was a trifle. Yet for that moment, Smith and Lasseter’s creation was the apotheosis of all the calculations, fractals, algorithms, and alpha channels. André’s hip wiggle as he hopped away from the bee hinted broadly that the simulated world could be as vivid as live action.
The short film premiered at Siggraph, the premier computer graphics conference, held in Minneapolis that year. Coincidentally, Lucas was in town, attending his girlfriend Linda Ronstadt’s concert. Not wanting to draw attention, he entered the conference theater after the lights went down. André was the last demo in the program. At the end of the 120-second saga, the room erupted. Don Greenberg, who headed a computer graphics program at Cornell, later said that during those two minutes, a thousand students decided to go into computer animation. “These people knew what we’d done,” Smith says. But at the after-party, Lucas’ praise was tepid. “George didn’t get it,” Smith says.
Disney didn’t seem to get it, either. But in one of their meetings, Smith and Catmull pitched a computer paint system to help animate the characters painstakingly drawn by human artists. Using digital painting would save time and money and allow the artists to add more detail to the hand-drawn characters. Disney executives decided to use the system, and Smith negotiated a deal between Disney and Lucasfilm. The Computer Animated Production System became the primary tool in all the classics of that era, including Beauty and the Beast. But Disney still didn’t want to make The Movie.
Meanwhile, Lucasfilm was suffering a cash crisis. Lucas and his wife were negotiating a divorce, and the impending settlement hurt the company’s finances. Worried about their funding, Smith and Catmull drove to a bookstore and went straight to the business section, where they each bought two books on starting a company. They figured they could build a business around their imaging computer, but also that, eventually, they could convince a studio to make The Movie.
Neither book contained advice for what would be Alvy Ray Smith’s main problem—how to deal with Steve Jobs.
The next year was full of frustrations. Smith and Catmull tried to bootstrap their division of Lucasfilm into a separate company called Pixar, but they struggled to find funding. Early in 1985, Smith’s former PARC colleague Alan Kay brokered a meeting with Steve Jobs.
Smith and Catmull worried that Jobs would not be open to their long-term vision of computer-animating a feature film. But after deals with Philips and General Motors fell through, Jobs, who’d by then left Apple and started a new company, NeXT, seemed inclined to let Pixar explore animation, as long as Smith and Catmull also pursued a graphics-based hardware business. He bought Pixar for $10 million. He’d spend about five times that before he was through.
For the first meeting after the sale, everyone gathered to hear from their new boss. Smith immediately feared that Jobs, by demanding unrealistic results, would overwrite the culture he and Catmull had built and burn out their team. “He’s got their brains snatched,” he says. He vowed to keep Jobs out of the building as much as possible.
Smith and Jobs routinely butted heads. Jobs often began meetings with an intentionally outrageous statement, and Smith made a point of pushing back. “It was a pure ego competition—Alvy wanted his vision to be dominant, and there was no way that was going to happen,” says Pam Kerwin, who was Pixar’s general manager.
Meanwhile, Pixar kept making short films that won acclaim. One, about lifelike desk lamps, even got nominated for an Oscar. Jobs saw them as marketing vehicles; Smith and Catmull saw them as test runs for The Movie.
At first Jobs tolerated Smith’s aggressions. Eventually, though, he began to lose patience. And then came the whiteboard incident. At a Pixar board meeting in 1990, Jobs was complaining that Pixar was behind on a project. Smith said that NeXT was behind on its products. As Smith recalls it, Jobs began mocking Smith’s Southwestern accent. “I had never been treated that way. I just went crazy,” Smith says. “I was screaming into his face, and he’s screaming back at me. And right in the middle of that crazy, absolutely insane moment, I knew what to do. I brushed past him and wrote on the whiteboard.”
Those few feet to the whiteboard took Smith past the point of no return. No one wrote on Steve Jobs’ hallowed whiteboard. As Smith took the marker and scrawled—he doesn’t even remember what he wrote—he was committing Steve-icide. “I wanted out of there,” he says. “I didn’t want that guy’s poison in my life any longer.”
Smith spent the next year holed up in his office. He had realized that users of personal computers could benefit from his graphics advances, so he began writing an app distinguished by what he called “floating imagery,” which allowed users to easily move objects. “You couldn’t believe what you were seeing,” says Eric Lyons, an Autodesk executive who saw an early demo. “It wasn’t something Photoshop could do at the time.”
Meanwhile, there was good news from Disney. At a meeting with Disney’s animation czar, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Jobs, Smith, Catmull, and Lasseter worked out a collaboration. Toy Story got a tentative green light. Once Smith felt sure that The Movie would be made, he left Pixar. (Years later, Lasseter resigned from the company after accusations of sexual harassment.)
Like a computer-graphics Moses, Smith helped deliver Pixar within sight of the promised land. But he never entered it himself. In movie after movie—from A Bug’s Life to Ratatouille to Soul—the studio pushed the boundaries of technology and art, fulfilling the vision that Smith had nurtured while in a full-body cast, on acid trips, in the mansions of Long Island, and on the back lots at Lucasfilm. His former colleagues at Pixar are unanimous in recognizing his contributions. But after he left, Smith’s name was removed from the website, an excision that he feels was somewhat of a betrayal. Catmull says he doesn’t see websites as historical documents.
Smith did not escape cleanly. With Lyons and a third cofounder, he started a company to sell his new image-editing software. They called the company Altamira, after the roughly 20,000-year-old cave paintings in Spain. But there was a hitch. “Alvy didn’t have it in writing that he could take his code with him”—code written while he was a Pixar employee, Catmull says. Jobs demanded that Altamira pay him a huge royalty for every copy sold, scaring away potential investors. After lengthy negotiations, Jobs signed off in exchange for an equity stake in Smith’s company.
One day Smith was at home with his wife and two sons when he felt “an intense screaming pain” in his chest. A colony of bacteria had invaded one of his lungs, forming the equivalent of a rind that had to be surgically peeled off. A month later, on a ferry ride to Vancouver, he felt the pain again. The same thing had happened to his second lung. To this day, he has only one-third of normal lung capacity. “I asked, why did I get it?” he says. “My answer is, the sheer stress.” Catmull agrees: “Basically, it was a life-threatening experience, which grew out of the pressure of Steve’s delay.”
The lost months proved crippling to the startup. In that time, Photoshop launched a competing feature called “layers.” Altamira’s sales were low, and the company needed a lifeline. Smith was introduced to Nathan Myhrvold, who headed Microsoft Research. “I just wanted marketing help from Microsoft,” Smith says. Instead, Myhrvold bought the company, though he wanted Smith more than his product. Smith spent four years there and retired in 1999. “I had decided along the way that they didn’t really care about my ideas,” he says.
Smith’s next move baffled his friends: He became a genealogist. He began methodically exploring his heritage, and in 2010 was elected a Fellow of the American Society of Genealogists. The honor is limited to only 50 living people, and it requires a supermajority vote.
After a divorce from his first wife, he met Alison Gopnik, the celebrated psychology professor at Berkeley, and they married in 2010. “He’s this sweet, amiable, successful man, but the kind of crazy hippie part is just underneath,” she says. A skeptic of his genealogy work, Gopnik urged him to write what would become A Biography of the Pixel.
For years, he traveled with her to conferences and on sabbaticals. Eventually, he found himself telling the stories of the people who created the foundation of what would become Digital Light. As well as his own.
You may not be able to pinpoint Smith’s presence in the code of the alpha channel or in the swooping camera pivot in The Wrath of Khan. But it’s there. The breakthrough behind the Pixar films was that it didn’t matter that movie screens and iPads were streaming bits entirely created within computers—the emotions they unleashed were as vivid as those produced by a human performance. More and more, the conventions of our existence—from money (cryptocurrency) to art (NFTs)—are moving to digital realms as consequential as their analog predecessors. What is the much discussed metaverse but an expression of physical civilization bathed in Digital Light?
So it’s no coincidence that in recent years Smith has been advising a promising virtual reality company called Baobab. In his meetings with the CEO, Maureen Fan, he dispenses advice not only on creating real-time graphics but on how to build a company and, uh, how to chemically expand one’s creative outlook. “He’s so idealistic,” Fan says. “And he did tell me I really need to do drugs.” (She passed.)
Early this summer, to celebrate the book, Smith gathered some of his former colleagues at his Berkeley home. For many, it was their first social event since the Covid curtain crashed down. Smith was in his familiar Hawaiian shirt, hair down his neck, with a beard and a broad smile.
Smith’s own copy of his book hadn’t arrived yet. An hour or so into the gathering, though, a guest showed up with it. Smith beamed as he held the book aloft.
For someone who had just written more than 500 pages about how digital media has overthrown physical products, he was oddly ecstatic to receive his words in a 5-pound analog package. Of course, reading those printed pages is just waves too.
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