Today, I'd like to explore the virtual through a film entitled Carla's Island, made in 1981 at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory by Nelson L. Max.
Film available here.
This animation is now famous as the first to offer a realistic 3D simulation of water using light processing. The film was produced on a Cray-1 machine and recorded frame by frame on 16mm film to obtain this 4:36-minute animation. To achieve this technical feat, Nelson Max relies on the use of ray tracing, here vectorized and treated as a set of curves. It is with this method (well known today) that the sea surrounding Carla Island can evolve with the light of day and night. The result is a contemplative film in which only the sound of the sea, the sun and the enigmatic music of a female voice and a guitar (music not found) reign supreme.
Let's take a look at the film's author for a moment. Nelson Max is Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, with a doctorate in mathematics from Harvard. He is a recognized specialist in data visualization, 3D animation, photorealistic rendering and augmented reality. His career has been built on the invention of a number of modeling, animation and rendering techniques, especially for the representation of scientific models. He is best known for his 1972 film Space Filling Curves, which describes the representation of complex curves and shapes and the mathematical models used to realize them. He is also renowned for his work on DNA representations, and for his 1986 SIGGRAPH conference entitled Athmospheric illumination and shadows. He is a pioneering engineer of feature and light representations for 3D models. In 1981, he made the film Carla's Island, demonstrating the animation of the sea using light effects on its surface. This film and this invention are still used today in 3D software.
But this film, mainly chosen for its technological innovation, interests me here for other reasons.
It is set in a period identified by Lev Manovich in his book The Language of New Media as that of a return to illusion and realism. While the first half of the twentieth century was devoted to other formal experimentations that gradually moved away from classical realism, the arrival of computer technology led to a certain return to these representations in the 1970s (although this should be qualified by the fact that generative art was also very active in the 1960s, leading to further experimentation with digital visualization technologies). It has to be said, however, that the arrival of several technologies enabled a new form of realism, which Manovich calls the “quest for illusion”. According to the author, this research lies at the crossroads of three relationships:
- the image's relationship to physical reality,
- the image's relationship to natural perception,
- the image's relationship to other images, and thus to the past and present.
This is precisely where Carla's Island stands: at the heart of a mathematical representation of physical phenomena enabling their visual simulation, but also in an attempt to represent the way our eyes perceive light on water. Even - and this is the ambiguity of the film - in a search for the sensations produced by this light on a beach, effectively referencing other images (photographs, postcards, films). This connection with other plastic forms can also be seen in the use of certain cinematographic techniques, such as the tracking shot at the beginning of the film (although physically impossible, as it descends from the sky, passes through the clouds and lands on the beach, all following an impeccable bezier curve) and in the temporal ellipses that allow us to move from one luminous atmosphere to another.
This work thus questions the use of digital technologies to simulate the behavior of physical phenomena. This point is important, as it allows us to access a new layer in the representation of the world: the generation of a form through the simulation of the physical phenomenon that brings it to life. As Nelson Max says here, he creates a realistic sea because he is able to simulate the sun's reflections on the water, and it is in this light simulation and its rendering that the real technological innovation can be found. But what the public sees is a sea that looks just like the one seen on a video image. We are faced with the simulation of a phenomenon that enables us to produce an image close to an image of another kind. As Manovich puts it: “The production of synthetic realism presupposes two objectives: the simulation of cinematographic codes and the simulation of the properties of objects and environments”, thus questioning what he calls the “malaise of synthetic realism”.
These elements say a lot about the definitions we retain of the virtual and the way we apprehend it. Even if the term is an old one (found in 15th-century medicine and theology), its current acceptance is that “which possesses, contains all the conditions essential to its actualization”, which therefore exists in potential. Nelson Max's sea first exists through calculation, before being made visible. The parameters then modified in the 3D environment transform the representation. But the image is born of calculation, born of a pre-established model that reacts to conditions. However, this notion of being in potential, i.e. containing the conditions of its actualization, is also a somewhat narrow framework of pre-writing. It is at the level of the latter that we find the place of representation and the stakes of form that Manovich identifies as profoundly cinematographic - or at least in a twentieth-century photographic and cinematographic heritage.
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Following on from these thoughts, one final element has always intrigued me about this film and remains, I suppose, the reason why it fascinates me.
Why this atmosphere? Why this place? The music? The sound? Why all this aesthetic effort for a film that's supposed to be a technical demonstration? Nelson Max has used his ingenuity to make this film enigmatic.
First of all, the location: despite extensive research, no information is available on this supposedly fictitious Carla Island, although it could be inspired by Santa Clara Island, opposite La Concha beach in San Sebastiàn, Spain. The island's morphology is similar, and the virtual camera's point of view matches that of the beach. Pure speculation ...
Then the opening tracking shot. The film starts above the clouds, then the camera quickly descends to position itself on the beach, never to move again. It's a completely cinematic introductory shot, allowing the title to be displayed as it passes, but also showcasing the infinite possibilities of the virtual world to move from the sky to the ground without worrying about physical constraints. This camera movement is clearly situated between cinema and virtual worlds, questioning the place of the two types of representation (a question later taken up by video games).
And the music? The film opens with this gentle melody (not found) and a female voice. The gentle ambience introduces the arrival on the beach, like an attempt at relaxation. The music is then replaced by the sound of the sea, accentuating the realistic effect of the simulated light on the water.
These staging elements take the film away from a purely technical proposition to give it a visual intention and atmosphere that, while framing and serving the effectiveness of the sea simulation, also deploys a visual universe and atmosphere that are so particular and dreamlike. This production questions this relationship with realism by immersing the image in a cinematographic and fictional aesthetic context, showing at least a desire on the part of the author to see his technologies employed to these ends.
We could even read into this film an aesthetic hypothesis on Nelson Max's part, almost anticipating Lev Manovich's remarks. Here, he seems to be showing us technological capabilities with aesthetic specificities, notably in the ability to create worlds and universes in states of transition, on the edge of something. This film is both realistic and unrealistic: the reflection of the water is very precise, but bears no resemblance to what our eyes perceive; the atmosphere is cinematographic, but very strangely offbeat. The animation seems to place us in a very virtual world, in all the things that we now take for granted in these environments. Nelson Max underlines the specificity of his medium, a new form of representation of the world - even on the scientific scale on which he usually deploys it.
This aesthetic is widely visible today, particularly on the web, but also among a younger generation of artists employing 3D, augmented reality worlds and video games. We even find here what Valentina Tanni calls “hypnagogic” in the aesthetic currents of vaporwave, understood as an aesthetic that remains in a state of transition, between dream and sleep, real and virtual.
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This work does not endorse a definition of the virtual, but questions its contemporary (re)birth and the origins of its forms. In this way, the aesthetics of Nelson Max's film are as pioneering as his impressive mastery of ray tracing and vector curves.
Lev Manovich, Le langage des nouveaux médias, Dijon : Les Presses du réel, 2020 [2001], 605 p.
Wikipedia, Nelson T. Max, consultable ici, 2019
Valentina Tanni, VIBES LORE CORE. Esthétique de l'évasion numérique, Audimat Éditions, 2025 [2023], 228 p.
FIG 01. From the film Carla's Island by Nelson T. Max