Abulafia Gallery

This web-based virtual gallery emerged from the combination of my having just taken an oil painting class (with Pheoris West), I was interested in generating linked web pages using Scheme, and I was also starting to script rendered 3D environments using Steve May’s AL.

The result ended up being the first site example in David Siegel’s best selling book “Creating Killer Web Sites” which meant it got a lot of hits back in the day.

In addition to a network of linked viewpoint pages, there was also a RenderMan animated fly-though, and a VRML version with a subset of the paintings.

Because this was made at dawn of the web and VRML I suspect it might have been the first 3D gallery space created by an artist to show their work on the web.

It also appeared in The VRML 2.0 Handbook by Hartman and Wernecke.

My 1995 self wrote: “This collection of images was created in oil on canvas as a storyboard for an animation of a skeptic nightmare. Inspiration was drawn from the current interest in mind/body implications imposed by contemporary virtual reality implementations.”