by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

"It was by far the worst professional experience I've ever had, and yet it's probably my artistic masterpiece."

So says digital artist Richard "Dr." Baily of his astounding space imagery in the 2002 American remake of Solaris. While Baily made his mark in digital animation with everything from Tron and Blade to The Cell and Fight Club (the crumbling skyscrapers were his baby), it was Solaris that, for all the grief with the studio, allowed him to showcase images created with the SPORE, his homebrewed psychedelic software.

A longhaired, high-heeled California wild man, nocturnal by nature and happiest working solo, the 52-year-old Baily is a rare creature even among his late-'60s freak-power peers, to say nothing of the suits often surrounding him. Baily remains one step ahead, even of artists half his age - hence his slot at the Elektra festival of digital arts (see also Music, p. 20).

"I've become known as a sort of a master of the abstract image, and where that gets used in cinema tends to be in dreamscapes, acid trips or some hallucinatory sequence. When something like that exists, my phone starts ringing. It's my little niche, and it's a very nice niche to be in."

Penchant for invention

At 19, painter/musician Baily left home in search of that niche, and after a few years of "girls, drugs, rock 'n' roll and all that stuff," it found him. Looking to harmonize his love of music and abstract art, Baily was drawn to the animation field, and ultimately the computerized wing thereof. "It was exactly what I was looking for, and didn't know it at the time."

In 1977, computer animation was still in its embryonic stage, which is why Baily sums up his tenure at Robert Abel & Associates special effects studio with one word - inventing.

"Everything that happened there could be classified under the heading of artistic invention of one kind or another. Over the years they did about 1,800 projects, and every one of them required some sort of synthesized, homemade solution to a particular problem. So you learned to think on your feet there."

That would serve Baily well years later when, after establishing his own studio, Image Savant, and riding high with the Fincher flicks and such, Hollywood hit its millennial dry patch. "Start-ups, globalization and the threat of the actors' strike sent a shockwave through the community. I didn't see it coming, and the whole thing completely died. It looked to me like I was finished. I literally went out of my mind, started descending into insanity.

"At my most stressed-out, freaked-out point, I went back to where I began. I said, okay, if the ship's going down, what is the coolest art stunt I can pull? Something that will make me notorious again, some sort of a last hurrah.

"I had this project that was sitting on the shelf, an ultra high density particle system that I'd cobbled together from other pieces of code and some of my own. I wasn't really a programmer, but I'd noticed that you could construct an image out of tens of millions of particles that had a very unusual characteristic - it looked like it was self-illuminated. It looked like you could sculpt light."

Spawning the SPORE

Baily's cosmic creations on the SPORE certainly suited Solaris, as they will the forthcoming Superman. But the SPORE was never intended solely for movie effects, if at all.

"Originally, it was designed to make a new kind of fine-art picture. My hot project, the one I really want to get a prototype built of this year, is essentially a screensaver, but mounted permanently in a wall in a residence. Every 15 minutes or so, it grows a new SPORE image on a computer screen - kind of like a lava lamp or an aquarium."

In the meantime, there are the movies, fine-art prints and even live music settings to consider (Baily's been chatting with composer Steve Roach about the latter). Another possibility is remixable images, an extension of what some record labels have been trying out. "Whatever's going on in the music business now is going to have a similar effect on visuals, five years down the road."

Whatever the future holds, Baily's likely to be one of the first there. "I feel very strongly that I have these angels that are looking out for me. All the extraordinary things that have happened in my career, I can't take full responsibility for. All of the work that I've done over the last 30 years has been with the intention of opening up a channel to the divine and to express myself that way. It's a spiritual quest as much as anything else."

Richard Baily joins UVA, Frédéric Bourque, Georges Fok, Etienne Auger, D-Fuse, Kevin Tod Haug and MK12 for Elektra's 1024 Design in Motion panel at Place des Arts (5e Salle) on Saturday, May 12, 2 p.m., $12. See SPORE images at www.imagesavant.com

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