software

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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10 concepts of computation (arranged in order of increasing outrageousness)

The ideational threads that weave their way through this list summarize the obsessions that motivated my work during the five previous years. There is a trajectory here: from a concern for the abstract, theoretical underpinnings of computer technology, to the intertwining of technical and cultural logics in the lives and politics of the people who create and use computers.

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Super-Abstract: Software Art and a Redefinition of Abstraction

Abstraction is a prevalent tendency in software art and might be understood as an anachronistic return to the forms of high modernism, or alternatively, as a phenomenon that has its roots within the nature of software itself.

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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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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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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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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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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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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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