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).
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.
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.
Each of these panels contains a set of 4 images selected from a superset
of 1000 randomly generated curves. This piece focuses on the interface between the machinic process of generation and the subjective process of selection. The grouplings formed on the basis of percieved similarity have little relation to the actual parameters which produce the work. The projective tendencies of the mind attribute characteristics like curliness, roundness, or even femininity, energy or wierdness to what are merely inert lines.
Because these curves have a kind of double ontology–they exist as figures, i.e. lines with a certain shape that can be drawn on screen or printed out on paper, and as a set of parameters within a complex parametric equation, i.e. a set of constitutive numbers, not unlike genetic material, from which they can be generated–they have specific manipulable properties. One of these is the ability to measure and interpolate the distance between any pair or set of figures.
The animations came after an extended exploration of the Bezier curves (as described in the main project's documentation).
In the previous work, I had output instantiations serially; while each instance stood alone, it also had a relation to the sibling productions and to the parent system. Taken together, a series of instantiations implies the system. In the animated variations, the implication of the system becomes legible in time.
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.
These works start from the example of Hesse's Metronomic Irregularity, translating the system first into language as a description of its system, and then into the performative language of software. The variability of paths between the regular spacing of the grid suggests a profusion of variation - the grid is exploded and parameterized relativized as a structuring mechanism. The possibilities for alternative organizing principles extends serially, pointing towards the infinite:
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.
