Color is imagined as a space. This work is one of my earliest, a browser art piece from 2001. It was originally accomplished using frames for the color cells. This version is rewritten for the contemporary browser (in 2024).
This software uses flocking algorithms as the basis for the composition of soundscapes. It is a meditation on the question of what the group is, and what its proper functioning is. If we seem to constantly be wondering if we are doing what we are supposed to be doing in a group, birds by contrast, know how to flock.
Forty years seperate the events captured in these images, one from May 1968 Paris and the other from November 2011 New York. The pixels from each have been rearranged to approximate the image of the other.
To say that under a regime of the digital, the photograph has become "dubious," as Peter Lunenfeld has, still does not account fully for the ontological change that photography has undergone. The gross manipulability of the photograph is actually that which is most clearly understood and commonly remarked on.
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.
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.
I participated in the Monster Drawing Rally put on by community arts and education oganization Southern Exposure as a fundraiser. 100 artists drew live for an hour and they sell the results. I used an 80's era pen plotter to do my drawings. I had written a java driver for the HP7475 and created a number of sketches based on a recursive tree algorithm.
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.
Animal painting is popular again; the evidence is on YouTube. But it was popular in the Fifties and Sixties too and taken seriously by some in the art world and certainly by some biologists. Congo, the painting chimpanzee was a star.
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.
Broken Wave is a "data toy." It generates both sound and visuals based
on a complex sign wave function that can be modulated and manipulated
by the user using mouse gestures.
The ideology of individualism requires the maintenance of some semblance of interpersonal difference. The horror produced by the idea of cloning, or the imagined forced conformity of communist society, is surely tied to a certain attachment to the idea of difference. At the same time, conformity exerts a strong influence and difference is disciplined away.
The reception of Bridget Riley's paintings in the 60s serve as an example for thinking about how a notion like kinesthetic empathy might be used to explain a viewers relationship to painting. It suggests a path away from an insistently integrative ego that is incapable of an empathetic attitude towards the other constructed within an unbridgeable difference. Heteropathic identifications with unidealized images of the other interrupts the stubborn refusal of difference. Our experience of a variety of art forms demonstrates this possibility.
In modeling the game Chutes and Ladders on a computer, we gain insight into the nature of both games and computation. The computer version, unlike the rule bound cardboard version, is unfixed, thus allowing for the displacement of a moral overlay by a free play of algorithmic patterning. The abstraction of the model preserves a structure but unleashes a principal of variation: the computer makes every constant a variable (as Marcos Novak observes as he describes the liquefaction of architecture). The arbitrariness of particular rules becomes evident.
A culmination of the work with harmonographs, this piece incorporates
a sound track which was constructed using techniques analogous
to the curves, and a voice-over which makes links between the
abstract forms and social, sexual, and computational concepts.
It is the first step in a narrativizing thrust of the work.
This work explores the possibilities within a single system for creating random highly variable curves based on a harmonograph simulation. The harmonograph was a popular scientific toy of the late 19th century (lately making a comeback in contemporary science museums) which drew complicated Lissajous figures by attaching a pen to a multidimensional pendulum.
This series investigates the effects of accumulated random figures. As in the work of abstract expressionists like Pollack, the aggration of rendered gestures define a characteristic mood that adheres to the nature of the media rather than seeking to transcend it.
In addition to the superimposition of images, there is a time-based strategy of accumulation of variation in sequence. These two pieces use this technique. They also embed the curve within other systematic relations.
1000 numbered curves in a continuous tweened loop inhabit two reams of office paper. In the gallery, visitors were invited to take away pages from the stack and interupt the continuity of the tween.
These pieces show the range of variation that is possible within this simple system. Each panel contains a set of 24 randomly generated curves. Titles are the dates and times of generation.
![Still: 0502, @ 4'39": complex overlay of colored curves.](/sites/default/files/styles/portfolio_first_16_9_900x506/public/portfolio/image/screenshot0502.png.webp?itok=ZseHP0my "Still: 0502, @ 4'39"")
