Birth and Evolution of Digital Art: Adrian Wilson on Paintbox, Memes,

Long before Photoshop, AI image generation, or digital art as we know it today, Adrian Wilson was already shaping the visual language of the digital age. As one of the early pioneers working with the Quantel Paintbox, he witnessed – and helped drive – a turning point that quietly transformed television, photography, and visual culture worldwide.

The Paintbox, first launched in 1981, was a groundbreaking digital graphics workstation used by major broadcasters and artists to create vibrant, real-time TV graphics, titles, and visual effects at a time when most imagery was still analog. The Paintbox shaped the look of broadcast TV graphics and was used to create pop-culture landmarks like the Nirvana “Nevermind” cover and movie posters for The Silence of the Lambs and Pulp Fiction.

In this conversation, Adrian Wilson reflects on the legacy of the Paintbox, the birth of digital photo-art, the rise of memes as a visual language, today’s AI-driven creativity, and why InkPoster represents a natural evolution in how digital art is experienced.

The underrated machine behind modern visual culture

When the Paintbox was designed, the whole point was that nobody knew something had been created using a computer. The idea behind the Paintbox was to produce a better version of everything that had previously been done manually.

So, the Paintbox is underrated because people don't understand it. And they, on purpose, were kept away from the knowledge that the Paintbox was involved in creating what they saw on the screen. In that sense, yes, it's underrated, partly because it was also a commercial product.

The Paintbox was created for television, and people tend to look down on television. If you win an Oscar compared to an Emmy, people always look down on that, sadly. And they always will. There’s a hierarchy in visual moving images. And the Paintbox was completely video-orientated to begin with. It later moved into higher resolution and into areas like Photoshop and film, but originally it was made for video.

Yet it completely revolutionized everything we saw on screens all over the world. Everything became Paintbox-generated just because it was cost-effective and allowed you to do far more interesting things. It was the equivalent of moving from a waterwheel to a steam engine. That was the big jump.

Everything people are talking about now with AI, for instance, is a similar kind of jump to what happened in 1981, when we moved from analog to digital television.

Learning to create with a tool no one understood

Any pioneering technology is annoying. The Paintbox was designed so you could simply pick up a pen – it was very user- and artist-friendly – but it still had to fit into a structure of what people expected and understood.

Imagine going somewhere where no one has ever seen an iPhone and saying, “I’ve got an app. I’ve developed an app.” People would say, “What on earth is an app? I have no idea what that is or how it fits into the world.”

So, the Paintbox was annoying in some ways because people didn't know what it did. You had to explain absolutely everything. But it was absolutely liberating because you could suddenly do things at a stroke of a pen that would previously have required all these skills and artisan craftsmanship.

You no longer needed to learn all of that, because the Paintbox could handle lettering, graphics, animation, photo retouching – all with a swipe of a pen. It was incredible, really.

Before Photoshop, before digital photography

Paintbox was a new instrument. And I don’t think you could really understand just how big it was going to become. I was manipulating photos in 1984 and I remember doing a promo – I just called it “new photography.”

At the time, there was no real name for it. Photoshop didn’t exist yet. People used the term Paintbox, but it was kind of further down the line. So, I called it new photography, because it genuinely seemed like a new way of making photographs.

I wouldn’t say I was prescient or particularly wise, but when you look at photography before digital manipulation – and then consider the later arrival of digital photography itself – it really is an entirely new medium. Digital photography and digitally manipulated imagery now make up almost everything we see.

I didn't realize we were going into this whole new era where all the things I was learning in college – chemicals, f-stops, all of that – would become largely unnecessary. It's funny that I was at the forefront of it, but I didn't realize it. I could now say, “Oh yes, I knew this was the future, I was a revolutionary marching through the wilderness, creating, putting flags down.” But at the time I was just doing it because it was fun.

From forgotten boxes to a living digital legacy

Back then, you didn’t document everything. You didn’t necessarily even keep your work. You made it, and then you moved on to the next project. So, when NFTs first appeared – with those million-dollar memes and everything – I found it hilarious, like everyone else. But then someone said, “They’re looking for early digital art.”

So I said, “Oh yeah, I used to do that stuff back in the ’80s.” I called my mum and asked, “Do you still have that box of stuff I left in the attic?” And of course – she did.

Because of that single act of keeping it, I recovered all my archive. All these images were all downloaded onto slides and videotape, et cetera. So basically, I kind of revisited that thing. It gave me a lot of pleasure – remembering those times that were more simple and more fun. Great digital times.

I also managed to get hold of a Paintbox and get it working. Showing it to other people was incredibly rewarding. You could see the joy on their faces – like giving a child a toy at Christmas, especially a creative one – seeing them drawing was just a real pleasure.

I feel like I'm bringing it alive again by not just sitting there on my own and doodling, but by bringing this community back together. And lots of people started going back into their own proverbial attics and pulling out images and artworks they’d forgotten about.

Because of that, I’ve discovered work by Keith Haring that no one had ever seen, David Hockney, etc. People would say, “Oh yes, I’ve got some of that — I’d completely forgotten about it.” So, it might sound weird, but I feel that the work I’m doing now is enabling all of this art to come back out.

A personal digital time capsule

My collection is kind of a little time capsule covering about six years, from 1984 to 1990. At the time, I was in Manchester, working in an old textile warehouse where my studio rent was literally $30 a week. And there I was, using a machine that cost $150,000, beavering away, trying things and thinking, “Hey, I’m doing this cool stuff – is anyone interested?”

It was interesting because you did this and you created a portfolio. And my portfolio had to be big – you know, photo slides – because there wasn’t really a light box. In the old days, you’d have a light table where you’d show somebody your slides, or they’d hold them up to the window. I had a VHS tape, but nobody was going to play your portfolio on a VHS tape.

That actually saved me. Many people working with Paintbox saved their work in Quantel’s proprietary formats – MO drives, eight-inch floppies – which are almost impossible to read now. My work, however, existed as 35mm slides. In a way, they were the JPEGs of their time. They still look as good today as they did when they were created, having sat in a box for 30 or 40 years. So, by accident, I ended up with a snapshot of the birth of digital photography and digital image manipulation.

I've got quite a lot of material, but compared to what you were doing, it’s actually very little, because you didn't save everything. Back then, saving it cost money. A lot was lost. But what does remain is an interesting snapshot of everything – from just a funny meme to my friends at Christmas, to works shown at important digital art exhibition in 1988 or was published in SIGGRAPH books.

Art as an invitation to think

For me, what makes any art valuable is what it conveys to someone else. I'm not really into decorative art. I think you should look at something, and it should make you question something, think about something.

My job as an artist is not to tell people what to think, but to encourage them to think. An artwork should be visually interesting, of course. But beyond that, it should have layers. And the more layers you look, the more things that you find interesting about it. That is what, to me, makes a truly good piece of art.

Memes as a form of contemporary digital art

I think memes are fantastic – they really are. In one sense, they’re simply about conveying a message. Even something like America’s Funniest Videos – someone tripping up, falling over – that goes all the way back to Buster Keaton and slapstick. That’s kind of where memes come from.

There’s always some funny twist at the end, a visual pun, or some disaster thing going on. And there’s also a long tradition of caricature. Whenever politics, the world, or the economy become a bit lopsided, caricaturists emerge – people who take an image and distort it.

I think memes are the modern caricaturist’s way of talking about the world. Instead of lecturing someone, you can point out the futility or the ridiculousness of a situation using a meme – or simply through a visual joke.

So yes, what better way to make people smile than a meme? I think they’re fantastic. Whether they’re a work of art is another question. But whether anything is a work of art is always decided by someone else.

If I call myself an artist, I probably am not an artist. If somebody else – a group of people – call you an artist, you probably are. So the idea that whether you think it is art makes it art is irrelevant. It's a consensus.

AI art and why creativity should be open to everyone

It’s fantastic that AI allows more people to do more things. It’s a very snobby and restrictive idea to say, “Hey, you’re not a photographer. You can’t have a camera on your phone,” or “You’re not trained, so you’re not good enough.”

Creativity isn’t unionized. The idea is to democratize creativity, art, and expression – so more people can express themselves. As a photographer, or as an artist, I’m not worried that there are other people doing similar things, or even better things. If I’m enjoying what I’m doing, that’s the pleasure of creativity.

That said, there is a massive issue around AI stealing other people’s work and simply recombining it. That’s the bigger question, really. But for me, art is for everyone. Music is for everyone. Creativity is for everyone. And especially these days, when we need a release, I think it’s fantastic.

So yes, there are always downsides to every technology. There are always downsides to every culture.

One digital artwork to keep for the future generations

There was a thing – people have kind of forgotten about it now – but I remember these images that were created maybe ten years ago – gigapixel images. I would say one of those. A digital image with so much information in it that you can just keep zooming forever, and different people get different things out of it.

Or maybe I would say some of the images from the space telescopes we have now. When you see those pictures of the galaxy created by NASA or whoever, that’s not actually how it looks. It’s a digital recreation of data so we can visually understand it. And I think one of those images – because it shows how small we are, how much information there still is to learn, and also how amazing digital technology is, that we can use it to make sense of the world around us that we can’t actually see with our own eyes.

So I’d probably say either one of those giant gigapixel images, or one of the latest, best views of the universe made with the technology we have now. Maybe in a thousand years people will look at it and say, “God, they thought the galaxy was that small,” or “They thought it was that color.”

It’s a bit like dinosaurs. For years we imagined them one way, and now the consensus is that they had feathers. But we're not having feathers on dinosaurs – we’re just used to a certain idea.

I think that kind of digital image is important, because it marks a point in our knowledge and also in our perception of the world around us.

InkPoster – unobtrusive way to display digital art

InkPoster is the right direction to go because it's trying to solve that 40-year-old problem of how to display digital art in our home in a way that doesn't necessarily look like digital art.

It's done digitally, but it's shown in a conventional way – even though the technology behind it is actually digital. I really like the idea that it's got all the benefits of screen-based art where you can change the image and change it with your mood. But it's not so obtrusive, not glowing like a TV, and your brain automatically link it to a screen-based art.

It’s really nice to be in this environment, with these InkPosters, which obviously is like a whole new medium for displaying digital media. Because back in the day, people were asking the same questions: how do we show people a TV screen? It’s the same conversation now, just applied to digital art.

Credits:
Image 1: Adrian Wilson by Ian T. Tilton
Image 2: Adrian Wilson Quantel Archive