Cascade, is a 10 x 35 foot mural-sized Iris print which was produced with Cone Editions Press, Vermont, in 1994. At that time Cascade was the largest Iris print on record, on the scale of the grandest of oil paintings and tapestries. The print, which consists of 32 separate sheets seamlessly tiled with no variations in color or density, was installed in a semi-circular gallery at the DeCordova Museum, Lincoln, Massachusetts, as part of The Computer in The Studio exhibition. Viewers standing in the center of the gallery became entirely immersed in Cascade's visual environment. The artwork took up 180 degrees of visual perception, leaving no space in peripheral vision for other competing visual data. Cascade was the flagship of a suite of 30 x 44 inch prints entitled Instrumental Variations created by Hugh O'Donnell and published by Cone Editions.
(Hugh O'Donnell, 1994) "For me creating fine art on the computer represented a radical departure from the hands-on methods of drawing and painting I typically used. 'When you drag a brush across the paper, you can never really predict what the brush will do. You know the direction of the line, but you never quite know what the character of the mark will be.' For my digital art, 'I wanted the computer to create its own dirt - its own interference.' So Jon Cone developed special filters to help me digitally create images that retained freshness and the autographic immediacy of a traditional drawing. I used a stylus, a digital pen, to draw the image in Photoshop. At the time Jon Cone wanted to show the machine in action. In an interview with Eileen Fritsch from The Big Picture Hugh O’Donnell is quoted as saying: "…The medium is not ink, but rather pixels, which were intentionally kept large and individualized. I never intended to mimic the effects of oil paint or brush marks at this time because computer generated art doesn't have the sense of direct touch. You do it by remote control. The instrument of the computer has a character of its own - it's as different as an electric guitar is from the human voice…."
