abstraction

Bezier

The project Bezier consists of experiments exploring the properties of the Bezier Curve – a workhorse of computer graphics. These elegant lines are the constituent elements of vector-based drawing and their mathematical basis finds its way into other aspects of visual display as well. For example, in motion graphics, the "ease-in" and "ease-out" functions used to create naturalistic movement can make use of bezier curves.

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Bezier Objects (animations)

The animations came after an extended exploration of the Bezier curves (as described in the main project's documentation).

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IV. Instantiations

I take three pieces from the recent CODEDOC show at the Whitney’s Artport to be representative of a certain strain of abstraction in software art that takes into account both the modernist traditions of abstraction outlined above and a cybernetic version of abstraction that, although it may share some surface characteristics with modernist painting, ha

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III. The Abstract

The word abstract has several senses: (1) it denotes, most literally, separateness, a meaning directly correlative to its Latin root abstractus, “to draw from, separate;” (2) it means something considered apart from a particular application or real world existence, i.e.

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VI. Yet Another Science

For computer science, the meaning of the word abstract is tied most often to the third sense of the term, as outlined above, generality. As with art, there seems to be some slippage, and particularly in theoretical deployments, the term can denote the conceptual.

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II. Art

In the orbit of art, abstraction lies cozy within the compass of a modernist program described by Clement Greenberg as an outgrowth of a Kantian immanent critique:

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I. A Collision

In the space we awkwardly refer to as the digital (denoting perhaps an era, perhaps a technology, a mode of production, a means of communication or recording, a virtual world or the mechanisms enabling its imagining, production etc.

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V. The Front and the Back

The front-end/back-end model taken as paradigmatic of digital art by CODEDOC is what is supposed to make the show’s reversal, its focus on the code, make sense. But CODEDOC’s presumptions are several: that digital art is visual; that digital art involves code; and, that its split is binary between a front and a back end.

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colorSpace

Color is imagined as a space. We see colors as distributed throughout a cube with black on one corner and white on the opposite corner. Red, green, blue, cyan, magenta, and yellow each have a corner. The rest of the colors-more than 16 million of them-are distributed as a gradient cloud in between.

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