software

Every Pixel Screaming

This video is derived from the archive of torture videos that came out of Abu Ghraib. By writing software that sonifies the otherwise silent frames of video, the work attempts to question the silence which has left the victims of these atrocities without justice or redress.

The visual aspect derives from the rearangement of the pixels by a color ordering algorithm.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Forest

The multication of trees, a forest makes.

Simulated Tree

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

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.

99 Bottles x 12 or Studies in Impatience

Taking off from the children's song, "99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall," this piece creates allegorical software in which the path of drawing turtle of logo progressively gets more wobbly.

Losing My Way

Experiments with the children's programming language "logo" resulted in these allegorical programs where the turtle (the drawing agent in logo) takes an anxious journey.