Practice

I work within a strictly algorithmic practice to re-examine the hand-crafted, the time-worn, and the human gesture - set in dialogue with the bygone practice of mechanical drawing and geometric construction. Using JavaScript, the coding language that underpins much of the dynamic internet, I revisit the slowness, subtlety, and warmth of pre-digital media. The challenge, and the journey, is to use computational randomness to explore a space of beauty that belongs equally to the past and the future. I call this nostalgia for the future.

Code-based art offers a new generation of artists both a playground and a laboratory: a space to explore new forms of mark-making, where the traditions of physical media can be subverted, inverted, and synthesized into fresh visual language. My approach draws from simple, foundational ideas within the art-historical canon and reinterprets them through algorithmically authentic methods - familiar enough to resonate, yet true to a medium that was virtually unimaginable only a decade ago.

Algorithmic Process vs Skeuomorphism

Creating surfaces that look worn and discolored might be seen as skeuomorphic, however I feel there is an honesty to this type of treatment because objects in real life are also typically aged in an algorithmic way. Usually through a repetition of partially constrained movements and patterns of specific interactions. The intrinsic visual properties we find comforting and fascinating in antique surfaces can be created in generative art in a very direct and authentic way. When I remove these layers of textural distress the underlying work is often somewhat unapproachable and cold. I feel the compositional flow is also softened and unified by the addition of algorithmic distress. Transitions are easier to visually digest and the overall visual variety and interest of the surface is increased. Perhaps what’s more important is there is a sense in which the art has settled into the physical world and has had interactions with it. Of course this is a lie but every story we tell in art is a lie. When creating the distress marks I am careful to leave the simple circle and line primitive building blocks at a scale that makes it easy to see on close examination how the art is constructed. This reveals the truth about the lie and creates visual tension between the illusionistic and abstracted mark making.