A HISTORY OF PIONEERING WORK IN MEDIA ARTS:

Educated in physics and chemistry, he has brought a combination of technological interests to his multimedia arts which have spanned 4 decades. He is currently developing a unique and next-gen holographic exhibition comprised of holograms and installations. This work is scheduled for completion in 2010, with exhibitions at venues to be announced next year. He is also President of Surreality Innovations Inc., and is developing a educational role-playing-adventure game for next-gen content in stereoscopic 3D, with future holographic 3D video in mind.

SOME ART & MEDIA HISTORY:

He has been creating and exhibiting avant-garde and documentary films and video since the late sixties, holographic displays and art since the early 70's, and web virtual reality and stereoscopic 3D video art since the 90's. During this time he developed custom-made film optical printing, video synthesizer, holographic recording and imaging technologies used in his published and exhibited works. He is a 'hands on' creator and technical innovator who freely acknowledges those 60's - 70's innovators (Moog, Buchla, Whitney, Brakhage, Cross, Benton and others) in the technologies and the arts that influenced his creativities.

He created the first holographic art studio in Canada (Visual Alchemy) and brought holographic art to Canadian audiences for the first time in the late 70's (including an exhibition in Ottawa on Canada Day, organized by Lorraine Monk and opened by then Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau). His holographic works have been internationally exhibited ever since.

During the 80's he was a tenured Associate Professor at Simon Fraser University, and headed a film and video department of production and film studies that steadily produced nationally recognized student achievements. He is a past publisher of two periodicals on film ('Opsis - Journal of Avant-Garde and Political cinema') and holography ('Wavefront'), and has invented / developed a number of film, video, holographic and 3D imaging techniques for art and exhibitions.

His films have received a number of awards, including a 1988 Los Angeles Film Critics Award, and his media art works are found in a number of international collections and have been exhibited internationally, including a 1997 stereoscopic 3D video showing at the Louvre, a 2002 film-video retrospective at the Electronic Media Arts Festival in Osnabruck, Germany, and a 2004 exhibition of 3D video, film, video at SeNef, Seoul, Korea.

VIRTUAL REALITY and BEYOND:

He created his first VR worlds with video textures in 1997 in co-production with the Banff Center for Media Arts and later created a number of VR art works independently. In the mid-90's he developed and exhibited in 1977 at the Louvre in Paris a number of stereoscopic 3D video art works, which are still viewed today.

In 2000-01 he was Head of 2D/3D Graphics for the Mission Corporation (Bellevue, WA) in developments of speech-interactive (avatar-based) graphical interfaces for next-generation (post-PC) environments. These environments were speech-interactive virtual reality (3D) settings and achieved demo completion prior to the collapse of the company. Razutis is still anticipating that the next-gen user interfaces will embody these type of environments.

He continues to create independent works in interactive 3D web graphics and installations, and is anticipating the coming of age (and to theaters) of stereoscopic 3D cinema, speech-interactive VR kiosks, and motion-picture holographic creations, no matter how the economy goes.

Complete lists of published works by Al Razutis in all medias related to the arts and art history can be found at http://www.xalrazutis.org/alchemists/visual_alchemy/Resume-bio.html.

His multimedia art site containing numerous examples of his multimedia art work is archived at http://www.xalrazutis.org/index.html.

His domain portal, containing links to all his web subjects, is at: http://www.alchemists.com/.