“Stepping Stones”
"Projected imagery can be traced back to the seventeenth-century Dutch
astronomer and mathematician Christiaan Huygens and his innovations with glass slides, but the originator of live 'painting with light' set to music was Seymour Locks, a professor at San Francisco State College. In 1952, Locks was looking to wow a group of art educators convening in San Francisco by reviving 'the European experiments of the twenties and thirties in projected scenery, and have dancers running in and out of scrim projected with designs,'recalls ’60s historian Charles Perry. He ended up using an overhead projector to cast images on the wall of swirling colored liquids in a dish while a jazz group improvised. It was a mutant, hybrid artistic enterprise born of the convergence of two trajectories: Abstract Expressionist painting and avant-garde filmmaking of the sort being produced by Oskar Fischinger and others seeking to create a correlation between abstract visuals and music. Originally a painter, Romero was introduced to light shows when he saw a “painting” performed by two of Locks’s former students in Los Angeles. By 1958, he had created his own approach and performed his visual compositions in Beat hangouts in L.A., accompanied by a friend on drums. Romero relocated to San Francisco and by 1962 was presenting his colorful, luminous experiments at parties, galleries, coffeehouses, and other spaces; one performance group inspired by Romero explored projecting images onto the bodies of nude performers. Stepping Stones translates a liquid-light performance
onto film, capturing the composition and movement of these glowing expressions. Today, many recognize Romero as paving the way for the undulating, hypnotic graphic imagery of 1960s rock shows."—–Louise Sandhaus, Earthquakes, Mudslides, Fires & Riots: California and Graphic Design 1936-1986, p 162
