People of Long Now

Stewart Dickson received a Bachelors Degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Delaware in 1981 and is a member of Tau Beta Pi and Eta Kappa Nu. The primary result of his undergraduate career was a United States Patent for a stringed musical instrument with electrical feedback, 1981.

Mr. Dickson's first professional one-man exhibition of sculpture and computer-assisted art was in 1982.

Stewart Dickson was employed from 1981 through 1984 at the Western Electric Company (now AT&T Technologies) on permanent assignment to AT&T Bell Laboratories, Naperville, Illinois, where he worked as a Development Engineer on the 5 ESS project.

Mr. Dickson was a guest lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS) in 1984 and collaborator with CAVS Fellow Joe Davis.

In 1984 Stewart Dickson founded a Department of Computer-Generated Imagery at Goldsholl Design and Film, Northfield, Illinois.

Stewart Dickson was employed as 3D Graphics Programmer at The Post Group, Hollywood from 1988 to 1993.  Mr. Dickson was co-inventor with William Villarreal of a patented image processing technique for printing digital video images onto theatrical film with improved picture quality.

Stewart Dickson was employed from 1993 to 1995 as Systems Manager at ReZ.n8 Productions Inc., Hollywood.  He was a Technical Director at Walt Disney Feature Animation from 1996 to 2002.  Mr. Dickson's film credits include "Ghost" (1990) (electronic film printing), "Freejack" (1992) (electronic film printing), "The Lawnmower Man" (1992) (electronic film printing and sculpture) and "Disney's Dinosaur" (2000).

In 1994, Mr. Dickson collaborated as a 'Digital Foundryman' for Santa Monica Sculptor Carl Cheng on his Los Angeles Metro Rail Percent-for-Art installation at the El Segundo/Redondo Beach Green Line 'Marine' commuter station.

Stewart Dickson has been a technical consultant, guest lecturer and collaborator at the California Institute of the Arts since 1989.  He has been a graphic artist and consultant for Wolfram Research, Inc. since 1990.

Mr. Dickson has lectured and exhibited at the King Steven Museum, Budapest, Hungary; the Canadian Museum of Postal History; the Chicago Public Library Cultural Center, USA; Imagina '91, Monte-Carlo, Monaco; El Art '91, Punkaharju, Finland; 1991 Heureka Swiss National Research Exposition, Zuerich; SIGGRAPH '91, Las Vegas, Nevada, USA; the International Sculpture Conference, IS'92, Philadelphia, IS'94, San Francisco;  the Interdisciplinary Conference on Art and Mathematics, AM'92, AM'93, Albany, New York;  The 1992 Art and Virtual Environments Program at the Banff Centre for the Arts,Alberta, Canada; SCAN '92, Philadelphia, USA; Third Inter-Symposium on the Electronic Arts, TISEA '92,Sydney, Australia; Fourth Inter-Symposium on the Electronic Arts, FISEA '93,Minneapolis, Minnesota;  Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1994, San Francisco; INTERSCULPT'95, Philadelphia and Paris; The Art and Aesthetics of Artificial Life, Los Angeles, 1998; the first Telesculpture Symposium,Arizona State University, 1999.

Mr. Dickson's project, "A Three-Dimensional Zoetrope of the Torus-Costa's Minimal Surface Metamorphosis"won First Prize at the First Digital Sculpture Competition held at the French Senate in Paris, 1999.  The Zoetrope was exhibited at the SIGGRAPH 2000 Art Show.

Stewart Dickson created a mechanical cam from the Equation of Time for the Clock of the Long Now by W. Daniel Hillis and the Long Now Foundation.

Stewart Dickson was a Visualization Researcher at the Computer Science and Mathematics Division of Oak Ridge National Laboratory from 2002 to 2005.  During this time, he was also a Ph.D student in Computer Science at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

From 2005 to 2007, he was a research associate at the National Environmental Modeling and Analysis Center and a principal scientific subject matter expert in visualization, Graphics Department, Office of the Director, NOAANational Climatic Data Center. He was also a Ph.D student in Computer Science at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte. Since 2007, he has been a research programmer specializing in visualization at the Integrated Systems Laboratory of the Beckman Institute, University of Illinois ar Urbana-Champaign.