Archives for the Month of April, 2007

Flickr Fruits 5

cunha woohoo
G22 – Leonel Cunha

Leonel Cunhas ‘Actionscript comps’ are a simple treat. The coloured atoms bound by bezier bonds (g22) remind me strongly of textile designs of the 60’s – a good excuse to peruse kmel’s Vintage Frabic Designs. Elsewhere we find energetic meshes of squiggles, layered in differing densities (g39) and conspiracies of microscopic lines and hatchings referencing meticulous drawing styles (g4).

Dr Woohoo’s produces abstract works utilising colour analytic algorithms which organise colours by frequency distribution and properties such as colour weight based on his InTheMod piece. Also worth a glimpse are his ‘Generative spiral paintings’ as well as the ‘The Spring 07 Color Study Collection’. The latter reference painters’ artworks from which the colours are interpreted from, in their titles.

Context free, mentioned here before, is a fun piece of software for generating self-similar graphics, L-systematics and Fractal patterns. Mcwrights set contains a few rare specimens, self-similar non-similars so to speak – Temples & Catastrophe being my favourites. Fractals, it goes without saying, can be extremely boring and sickly, especially when garishly coloured. Remove the colour to reveal the form and iterate the output to the point where the familiarity of self-similarity breaks down and we are back in business!

Previous Flickr Fruits:
Fruits 4, Fruits 3, Fruits 2 & Fruits 1

Flickr territory continues to expand exponentially as a testing ground for newly hatched sketches & experiments from all kinds of artists. The design of the Flickr leaves aside personal ‘site design’ traditionally housing artists works and sometimes occluding the work itself. It provides a ‘level playing field’ for the eye, as well as facilitating easy access to groups and sets of works within the all important community networks. Allthough many have mentioned its ‘Big Brother’ propensities, me included……

Related:

Brushes.paints.stencils.
Results 1 – 20 of about 156,000 for fractal

Chris Natrop: Into the Silver See-Through

Chris Natrop
Into the Silver See Through – Chris Natrop

The history of paper cut art goes back a very long way, back to the 1st century AD in China according to Wikipedia. More recently, however, Chris Natrop has been producing exquisite and finely crafted paper cuts as both singular pieces and multi-faceted wall hangings. The latter larger pieces hang like delicate foliage or crystalline systems, the use of light and the projected shadows enhancing the effect. It could be a freeze frame of a giant complex system or chaotic attractor being played out a in a shadow play theatre, a Wayang.

The excellently titled ‘Nerve Brane Space’ set hint at an organic cartography or insinuate architectural models but with their standard linear formations and sharp angled perspective translated into fluid.

Dave Bollinger: Labyrinthine multiforms

dave bollinger

Dave Bollinger is a US based artist/programmer who uses simple systems/algorithms to create complex multiform artworks.

We can only imagine flying through the stark graphic manifolds of the ‘Shadow boxes’ set. These graphic symmetrical and asymmetrical 3D labyrinths, realised in Processing, often contain as many as 40,000 boxes where the organisation of the small boxes with the larger ones makes for some elegant compositions. ‘The original intent with this series was to produce a sort of “three dimensional Rorschach test” in negative space, where the boxes aren’t really there, just their shadowed edges, but you see them anyway.’ he says.

Another of Dave’s sets, ‘Cubicles’ is a ‘particle-based generative art system that produces isometric line drawings’ and constructed using ‘an algorithm that is entirely two-dimensional but gives an illusion of depth… leading to some Escher-esque constructs….’

Relying again on a diversified and variegated construction process, are the ‘Sticks and stones’ set, which Dave describes as ‘Generative Sculptures’.

Fr̩d̩ric Chaubin РCosmic Communist Constructions Photographed

Frédéric Chaubin
“Druzhba Holiday Center (Yalta, Ukraine, 1984)

If according to Goethe, ‘Architecture is frozen music’, then what can we suppose the buildings photographed by Frédéric Chaubin would have sounded like if thawed from their modular stasis, Steve Reich mixed with Shostakovich? or Phillip Glass developing a Scriabin motif…?

French photographer Fr̩d̩ric Chaubin has spent the last 5 years photographing the extremities of sci-fi Brutalism of the former Soviet Union. CCCP: Cosmic Communist Constructions Photographed presents these photographs at the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York, on view from April 24 РMay 26, 2007.

‘Operating in a cultural context hermetically sealed from the influence of their Western counterparts, these buildings drew inspiration from sources ranging from expressionism, science fiction, early European modernism and the Russian Suprematist legacy to produce an idiosyncratic, flamboyant and often imaginative architectural ménage’

A good interview with Chaubin about these photographs can be found here.

Joost Rekveld – Light Matters

Joost Rekveld
Film47 – Joost Rekveld

Light Matters is the online home of filmmaker and writer Joost Rekveld. I first stumbled upon Joost’s site when doing some research on visual sound a few years ago, specifically Hans Jenny’s Cymatics and his precursor in the field of sound visualisation Ernst Chlandi. Recently Joost uploaded more material and organised his output with a new, easy to navigate site – also including a blog.

Light Matters contains documentation of Rekveld’s films which deal with the refractive/reflective/interference qualities of light ‘inspired by concepts found in medieval and renaissance optics’. The description for #23.2 Book of Mirrors reads:

‘These images are caused by the interplay of light waves directly onto the emulsion, not using lenses as they are used normally to reproduce a scene outside of the camera. In that way I try to explore alternative forms of spatiality not related to traditional pictorial perspective’

#11, Marey < -> Moiré is a film where filaments of light converge and diverge to produce colourful light interference known as Moiré patterns.

Included in the writing section are a number of excellent articles dealing with abstract film and the sonics of visual systems – visual music. Symmetry and Harmonics, for example is replete with many traces to the history of arcane sound/image contraptions like the kaleidophone and relationships between geometric glyphs and sound waves.

Light Matters was rediscovered via a post at the excellent Moon River Blog

related:
Early Abstractions (1946-57) Harry Smith
Paul Friedlander – Oscillating light kinetics
Abstronics: Mary Ellen Bute
Kinetic colour sound
Jordan Belson

Sol Lewitt (1928 – 2007) – ‘The idea becomes the machine that makes the art’

sol lewitt
Cube Structure Based on Nine Modules (Wall/Floor Piece #2) – Sol Lewitt

Sol Lewitt died yesterday. If you have had your eye on Dataisnature for a while, you will have heard his name mentioned a lot on these pages. Just after the time of the ‘heroic’ gestures of Abstract Expression Lewitt conceived of a new language utilising simple impersonal forms in repetition and modulation, often drawing directly onto the wall. The fact that these Conceptual drawings were designed to be painted over solidified Lewitt’s claims that the ‘idea behind the work supersedes the work itself’ and that ‘The idea becomes the machine that makes the art’. Prophetically for our times Lewitt also said that “Ideas cannot be owned. They belong to whomever understands them.”

The works are conceptual and aesthetically pleasing at the same time and Lewitt’s path eventually lead him to writing instructions for making a piece of art. These instructions meant that his works could be recreated anywhere and more importantly it represented a shift in ‘artistic authority’ from a centralised model to a distributed one. The idea of ‘instruction based art’ was incredibly forward thinking when we consider the contemporary practices of digital generative artists and their use of code and algorithms to make ‘pictures’. More so the concepts and philosophies dealing with ownership have never been more relevant.

added : Tom Moody reflected this post and added some extra interesting thoughts on Lewitt’s work and other valid points regarding my post.

Flickr Fruits 4

ben_lepley
Site-ben-10.06-2 – Ben Lepley

In the spirit of Harold Edgerton’s classic Milk Coronet we find Keesssss’s studies of water droplets.

Alphaburn is a sequence of frames from a Max/Jitter piece by Joshua Kit Clayton where shards of light breakdance.

Murky’s has made some hand drawings of mathematical objects and conjectures that have a whimsical & human quality not felt in computationally generated versions!

Lennyjpg’s optical particle processes include these Rileyesque extrusions.

Ben+-+ has produced a nice set of architectural renderings infused with Euclidean multiforms.