THE EVOLUTION OF: ANT ATTACK

“I don’t think I’d seen a giant ant movie, and I’m not sure if I thought about the ants as giant when I was making Ant Attack”
SANDY WHITE

Given his background in sculpture, it follows that art school graduate Sandy White would gravitate toward 3D computer graphics rather than 2D ones, but that doesn’t explain his leap from stone to pixels. In fact, Sandy was fascinated with circuits and computers from an early age, and as he explains, this led to him combining art with technology, which got him a job with a perk. “I was using a Sinclair MK14 at art college, which had a little LED calculator display, and I made a few sculptures that had processors in them,” Sandy recalls. “Some businessman saw what I was doing, maybe at my degree show, and his business had a plan to do something with Prestel – a basic online service. So I got roped in as a programmer, just to make a bit of extra cash, and I got the loan of an Acorn Atom.”

When the young artist wasn’t using the Atom for work, he tinkered with its low-res, black-and-white display, and this resulted in him accidentally building a virtual world. “I managed to make an isometric cube,” Sandy recollects, “and I wrote a bit of code that sprayed cubes all over the screen in random places.