Dr. Jack Citron of IBM became interested in Whitney's work and began collaborating with him before there was any formal IBM support. Dr. Citron later was given formal responsibility for further work with Whitney under the IBM program, exploring the creative possibilities inherent in the IBM Model 360 computer and the IBM 2250 Graphic Display Console. It was Citron who wrote the original program called GRF (Graphic Additions to Fortran), which Whitney has been using since 1966.

		Whitney: Dr. Jack Citron and I talked for some time before I actually began working. When I first began to realize from IBM that I would be given the grant, the first thing that came to my mind was the question: would I be able to draw a free-hand line and somehow get that into the computer as digital information so I could manipulate it. I was presenting these ideas in preliminary talks and I was told that anything you can define mathematically you can do with a computer very easily. His first computer generated film is rarely seen, but delightful. Whitney titled the film Homage to Rameau not only because Rameau wrote the baroque music heard on the soundtrack, but also to reference Rameau's book Treatise on Harmony.
Whitney's set-up for filming computer animation at IBM Labs.

Perutauions, the first cohesive film to come out of Whitney's work with the digital computer, is a dazzling display of serial imagery that seems to express specific ideas or chains of ideas through hypersensitive manipulation of kinetic empathy. The patterns, colours, and motions dancing before us seem to be addressing the inarticulate conscious with a new kind of language. In fact, Whitney thinks precisely as the development of a new communicative mode. "The film contains various types of dot patterns which might be compared to the alphabet. The patterns are constructed into "words," each having basically a two hundred-frame or eight-second time duration.
		John Whitney's Permutations (1966).

These words in turn can be fitted contextually into "sentence" structures. My use of the parallel to language is only partially descriptive; I am moved to draw parallels with music. The very next term I wish to use is "counterpoint." These patterns are graphically superimposed over themselves forward in many ways, and the parallel now is more with counterpoint, or at least polyphonic musical phenomena. Should it be called "polygraphic phenmena". The patterns that were then recorded onto black and white 35mm film. The filmed images were then further enhanced with a specially designed optical printer to add secondary motion and colour.