This is as close to suggesting the origin of Oskar's absolute as I will venture. I once asked Elfreida Fischinger if her husband would have used a computer if today's personal computers had been available to him. After all, the precision and accuracy with which he rendered his forms must have been an all-important element of his own experience of his art. Supplanting his hand skills with a computer would not have appealed to him. Yet when I begin to think of some of the technology he employed, such as the wax-slicing machine, early experimental color film techniques, or the structural wire supports in Optical Poem, I can't help but wonder if the computer might not have given Fischinger another dimension to explore.
Computers are really just fancy adding machines.
Only the technology which delivers the squeezing has changed over the years. IBM clones, Macintoshes, Amigas and even low-end Unix machines like the SGI Indy are financially within the reach of all of us. I believe the Oskar Fischinger of 1920, could he be transported to the 1990s, would embrace the computer as a useful and necessary technology. I think the Oskar Fischinger of 1990 would have less interest in the computer as a way of producing animation, but might be intrigued with its other potentials, such as its ability to marry sound and image in a real-time environment. William Moritz, The Films of Oskar Fischinger, Film Culture, No.