Practice

I work in a strictly algorithmic practice to reinvestigate the hand crafted, the time worn, the human gesture, memory and nostalgia, abstract expressionism, and the bygone crafts of mechanical drawing and post war commercial arts. I use JavaScript, the scripted language that underpins most dynamic internet content to revisit the slowness, subtlety and warmth of pre-digital media. The journey and the challenge is to use computational randomness to explore a space of beauty that equally belongs to both the past and the future.

For me, making art is a journey from an unknowable place to another unknowable place. It is complex and paradoxical. I have little interest in making art that’s easy to explain with words. If I had everything mapped out conceptually before I started it wouldn’t seem like a journey worth taking. Building a work is an act of discovery. 90% of the ideas I think about in the studio are algorithmic and visual in nature. Principally I have always been a picture maker first and foremost. Everything in my work has to first and foremost be an essential ingredient at a macro compositional level and micro textural level. Color has to sing, but this is only accomplished when color, form and texture play nicely together. There is a sense in picture making that these elements cannot be abstracted apart from one another.

Code-based art offers a new generation of artists 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 languages. My approach is to take simple, foundational ideas from the art historical canon and reinterpret them through algorithmically authentic methods—ways that feel familiar enough to be relatable, yet are 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.