2010

Mimesis/Synthesis

In these plotter drawings two systems of representation are contrasted: mimesis, wherein the form of the representation is derived through a process of imitation; and synthesis, wherein the form is derived by a process of virtual ontogenesis -- that is the form is made in a way analogous to the process of growth in the referent.

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Contemporaneity

The stochastic photo algorithm I developed for use with the pen plotter was put to work here to animate an image of me speaking before the camera. As usual, I am concerned with my relation to the moment, and in a more general way, how it is that artists negotiate a triangulation between participation and criticality towards the trends of the day.

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Perlin Clocks

The multi-dimensional gradient noise provided by Ken Perlin's algorithm is the compass for this minimal study in variation accross a grid. The direction of the line is determined by perlin noise.

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Photo Strands or Stochastic Photography

The constraints of drawing with an antiquated plotter include the difficulty of drawing anything but straight lines. So to represent photographic images took some creativity. This software draws random lines in a density inversely proportionate to the light density of each area in the photograph.

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Forest

The multication of trees, a forest makes.

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Simulated Tree

A more naturalistic simulation of the tree avoids obvious fractal geometricizing self-similarities and adds a hint of randomness.

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Fractal Tree

The first drawing algorithm I tried, after writing a java driver for my HP7475 plotter, was a recursive tree algorithm. These simple figures based on repeated uniform bifurcations produce almost perfect fractal structures. They are varied by changing the ratio of the left and right branches, the thickness of subsequent branches, etc.

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Plotter Drawings

Working in software has made me particularly interested in the fetishization of the artist's hand. That is why a drawing machine is a particularly attractive output device. It mediates the gesture of the hand drawn and the machinic world of software which is most often present to us now as the bloodless surface of a screen.

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State of the Union

State of the Union (SOTU) provides access to the corpus of all the State of the Union addresses from 1790 to 2010.

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