software

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

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.

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.

Pornocopia imagines pornography as a machine, a system, a software, an algorithm: a device for the multiplication of desire or for the production of desire’s contagion. It is structured as 10 software mechanisms, which play out a sequence of state changes within a single minute while containing a series of porn images.

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.

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.

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.

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.