Overview: ideas and intentions
In contemporary experience, media-saturated
and data-driven, human and computer decisions – and corresponding actions – are
increasingly intertwined. The technological precision of the machine
operates in conjunction with the errors and inflections of the individual
humans who program the computers and enter the data. My works are
metaphors for this blend of the human and the machine, combining
the hands-off exactitude of computer programming with the hands-on
discipline of traditional art making, merging a sense of technological precision
with the visible presence of the human hand. As
such, the work explores involuntary gesture, the inflections
and irregularities which indicate the presence of a human hand yet
stand apart from individualistic/expressionistic gesture, the arena
which has historically dominated the very notion of gesture.
Authorship is shared; as
artist/programmer, I code the program that drives the computer,
which determines composition via random number generation, creating
output which then directs my hand. My
work maps the output of computer algorithms, a practice significantly
different from using the computer purely as a tool or facilitator.
Code structure generates visual structure, and each individual execution
of the code generates the map for a unique artwork.
Process: Each work begins inside the computer using a custom
program that I have designed and authored. First, a computer algorithm
creates data within a flexible ruleset that leaves many decisions
up to the computer. Next, the program translates the data, literally
mapping the path and decisions of the algorithm to generate a computer
image that is then printed to serve as the cartoon for the work.
The algorithm map paintings developed from the
notion of a paint droplet as the paint equivalent of a bit (the most
basic unit of digital information). The burn drawings originated
from a series of experimental drawings made from paper alone.
Algorithm Map Paintings After transferring the cartoon
to a panel, I render each colored dot as a paint droplet, strictly
following the computer output while deliberately leaving the occasional
error, as when two adjacent droplets merge together. Then, layers
of paint are repeatedly built up and removed, using hand processes
of painting and sanding which bring my touch and intuitive judgment
into the process, such that the droplets become raised dots, surrounded
by tiny rings of color.
Electric
Burn Drawings
The cartoon is placed on top of a sheet of paper and traced using
an electric burn tool. As
a line is traced, the tool burns tiny holes of slightly varying
size through both the cartoon and the paper beneath; the size
of individual holes is related to how quickly my hand is able
to move, as well as whether or not holes are burned repeatedly
due to placement at an intersection of two or more lines.