software

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).

Because I often ask myself “What is the signature of the artist when compared to the gesture of the machine?”, I returned to the compound sine waves I explored years ago as “harmonographs”, this time to further interrogate the question of “line” and “hand” under the rubric of pseudo writing. 

In asemic writing, the style and gesture of writing becomes divorced from meaning. Examples are found in the modernist works of Cy Twombly and Henri Michaux, or in the more contemporary work of Mirtha Dermisache. 

In Motherwell's  "Elegies to the Spanish Republic," abstractions of bull testicals serve as symbolic links with heroic death in the bloodly tragic war with fascism. He ties the Spanish bullfighting culture—a spectacle of life and death embeded within the everyday—to the contemplation of a specific historical loss.

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.

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.

The question of what it is possible to think under the current regime of the United States, and what it might be possible to think sheltered from the threat of government surveillance is the journal's main concern. The Journal of American Thought Crime distributes a literary magazine in the form of an encrypted mailing list.

The infamous photos of Abu Ghraib came to light in 2004. Now, four years later, we are still debating the ethics of torture, and are still apparently unable to really process the contents of the images we received from the American dungeons of Iraq.

In this piece, the systematics of Riley's work are animated in the machine, and their wave-like potential is realized.

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.