Attractive glitch
Buggy color fading code.
Because beats are better when they’re just a little bit Evil
Skrillex: Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites. Evil commences at 00:45.
Poke me in the other eye, please: Artists and poverty
Perhaps I’m in a personal info-wormhole but lately I’ve become aware of any number of articles, books and lectures explaining in gruesome detail just how unattractive being an artist is in terms of comparative job quality. The other day it was a summary on Rhizome (by John Powers and William Powhida) of a lecture Hans Abbing’ gave on artists and poverty. Abbing is the author of the book Why Are Artists Poor? Today Furtherfield tweets a link to a Guardian article (from 2010, admittedly) detailing artists’ day jobs.
(My fave day job, popular with Norwegian artists, isn’t listed: Work in a mental hospital or better yet wards for the criminally insane - they accept weird hours, respect the need for sudden breaks from work and they pay fairly well yet demand no actual education. Just be prepared for clients who defecate in public.)
Then there was the hilarious Huffington Post article “Study Reveals Artists Have High Salaries”, based on a clever survey by none other than the US National Endowment of the Arts. Said survey managed to prove that “artists” on average make more than the US median income - that is, if by “artist” you also mean architects, designers and art directors. You know, those well-paid kids down the block that you hope to maybe sell your work to someday.
While I applaud the efforts of W.A.G.E. and art blogs like Hyperallergic in their efforts to bring attention to the plight of the artist it seems a done deal and noone’s really that interested. I have attempted to break it down for people at cocktail parties at least twice and interest rapidly dwindled. Realizing that this is the case I can’t help but feel that I should embrace my dismal chances of ever owning real estate and stop telling people about it. Ignorance is the better part of bliss, no?
Maybe we should just not discuss how badly the few artists who don’t quit two years after art school are doing in terms of financial wealth and societal status symbols. After a while it’s just cruel. It’s not like we signed up to have people poking us in the eye with a stick on top of everything else.
Postscript: The paradox of being a digital artist is that while your chances in the art market are slim to none, at least your digital skill set is remarkable desirable in the real world. Compared to oil painters we really have nothing to complain about, except the occassional advertising client who wants to pay silly money in exchange for getting the work done yesterday.
Relevant links:
Call: Generator.x 3.0 - from Code to Atoms
The call for participants to the Generator.x 3.0 - from Code to Atoms workshop at iMAL in Brussels next month is still open. We’ll have Makerbots, a laser cutter and a CNC mill on site to play with so if you’re interested in digital fabrication and parametric systems this should be of interest to you.
Full text and entry form can be found at:
http://www.imal.org/en/activity/generatorx3
Cellular automata as pattern generator
Working on pattern generation using cellular automata. I haven’t played with CA since 1998, so it feels pretty old school. The rulesets are hard to control, but some of the more regular ones have potential when overlaid. Adding crazy colors gives bonus points.
Clarification: These images were made by manually layering several separate runs of my CA, they’re not the result of a single complex CA system. There is no actual interaction between the colored layers in the simulation.
RibForm series
Work for a new 3D printing project, built completely in Processing with Wblut’s Hemesh library and my own Modelbuilder. Hemesh was used for the lattice structure, with the underlying structure first being built in Modelbuilder.
Most of these aren’t even printable, the final result (seen here) had to be quite solid and somewhat simplified to be guaranteed to print. The print material is a copper alloy, and the piece is approx 14 cm in radius with 8 cm depth. Front and back views were intentionally made quite different to allow several readings of the structure.
Open Objects: The Future of Things (lecture)
Lecture about the rise of digital fabrication and parametric design, looking at their implications for creative practices. Specifically, Open Source design (Makerbot and Thingiverse), generative systems and data sculpture.
Given Nov 26, 2011 at Code Camping Amsterdam, Hack de Overheid, Amsterdam
MBSys - new work for Montblanc
Fast Company Co.Design posted a feature yesterday about a recent project for Montblanc that I was involved in. The article focused on Onformative, showing several nice examples of their piece. But it also named me, somewhat awkward since I hadn’t published any documention and so there was no visual context.
To rectify the situation I’ve now posted some process documentation as well as some “director’s cut” renders that are far more complex than anything seen on the Montblanc site. The issue of readability between foreground (product) and background (animation) meant that most of the pieces used are somewhat tame in comparison.
The work was commissioned by Scholz & Volkmer. My piece was intended for the eyewear section of the site. Other artists included David Dessens, Anthony Mattox, Onformative and Vincent Rebers.
Death and the J2ME applet (NTLSys 1-3)
I recently posted on Flickr some images of NTLSys 1-3, a J2ME app piece I did for Nokia Trend Labs in 2007. They had been lying around on my hard drive, and even though this is hardly a major work (I do still think it’s somewhat charming) I still thought they were worth archiving permanently.
Then it struck me: This piece will be gone forever in just a year or two. I can still run it on a couple of old Nokia phones I have lying around, but most likely even those will be dead soon. And what is the likelyhood of a J2ME app being supported by smartphones in, say, 2015?
Not that media obsolescence is a surprise, in preparing software artworks for gallery sales I have certainly considered how they may be preserved. But this might be my first full-on collision with the issue. After all, I still have Java applets written in 1996 hanging around with perfectly valid bytecode that will run in any Java-enabled browser. But for this piece and others like it death will most likely come rather soon with the death of J2ME, with the exception of running them in emulators (which might also become extinct soon enough.)
Perhaps I should go out and buy a mint J2ME-capable phone just for the sake of preserving this piece? Or should I be content to just let it die, the same way most of my compiled executables likely will given enough time? Of course, I always archive the source code and so can recreate it at will, that will always be the fallback option for any software art work. Hardware is not long for this world, but code is forever.
NTLSys 1-3 is still available for download, just point your J2ME phone at www.unlekker.net/ntlsys.jad.
Concept vs. Form, that old chestnut
This post is a response to a longer thread on Google+ between Ben Bogart and myself. Specifically, the following is specifically a response to his long post titled Is generative art conceptual or formal? (the post is not currently public, but if you’re on G+ you might be able to see it).
I don’t believe in segregating work into concept or form camps. But such a division exists de facto. If you read the [eu-gene] mailing list you will find a community of generative artists who are largely disdainful of form for form’s sake, and who believe in conceptual stringency or scientific precision as parameters in the work.
If Generator.x ever represented a community, I’d venture to say that community is more concerned with form than with logic or science. But that doesn’t mean the work is without concept. Casey Reas might be an artist whose output is sumptuous and painterly, but he stands apart from the pack by using a Lewittian method of breaking down his works into plaintext rules.
In my own work I am concerned with the expression of non-verbal forms and spaces as the consequence of parametric processes, and I rarely if ever provide my audience with a text explaining my concept or the process I went through. I believe in letting the work speak for itself, even if that means that viewers might overlook an aspect that might have been essential to the artist.
A lot of my “studio time” (in quotes because it doesn’t happen in a studio, but my nomadic presence in physical and net space is analoguous to other artists’ studio time) is spent I “reading” and consuming forms and structures by random sources, primarily other artists but also from pop or vernacular culture in general. This is how I do research, not by building a scrapbook to copy from but as a means to trigger ideas or interests in my own world of ideas. I’m a form junkie, and I don’t think that makes me a shallow person.
However, I’m always baffled by the notion that conceptual work is somehow “formless” and purely cerebral. I consider concepts as having form just as much as I do colors and layouts. The best conceptual artists have high form, often expressed as wit or a certain poetic elegance. The best performance artists have form expressed as communicable emotional experience. I have never been impressed by any artwork in any medium unless it had a good form in some way.
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To return to generative art, I would firstly say that I disown that label. It describes a “how” without a “why”, and hence is meaningless as a description of a movement or a conceptual direction.
I have tentatively coined the phrase “Software Abstraction” as a provocation describing artists like myself who construct software systems to produce abstract form, generally with a focus on the final output but still very much aware of the process as a conceptual device. Despite the art world’s current dislike for manifestoes or movements, I think some coherent term is needed. The group of artists largely considered “generative” have very different concerns than Verostko and others, coming as they do from a completely different cultural context. And their interests should bear defining.
Software Abstraction seems to me like a short and concise summary of these artists’ practices, based as they are on computational processes and software as a creative medium. Abstraction is what they do, with obvious nods to movements like Op Art, Minimalism and Constructivism. They are not uncomfortable with the black box logic of complex software processes, and consider the output to be the primary form of the work even though their personal experience (through knowledge of the underlying system) is more complex. Some feel the need to make the system explicit, others do not.
Addendum: Florian Jenett has argued that the term Software Abstraction still chains artists to a technology and thus hinders integration with a larger contemporary art discourse. This may or may not be true, but I would argue that A. It’s a concise label describing a specific identifiable practice, and B. There is always a need to distinguish one’s work from the vast masses of artists out there. At least this label borrows both from technology and art theory, the latter usually conspicuously absent in media art discourse. Casey Reas takes a different position, pointing out that Abstract Art is a dead and outdated art form and that it would be better to align oneself with Constructivism. Either way, I would like nothing more than for someone to come up with a brilliant label that makes my feeble provocation redundant.
As a final point, I’ll concede that I have often described a certain schism in generative art along the concept / form lines described. To demonstrate it I have borrowed the idea of “weak” and “strong” from artificial intelligence, definining “strong generative art” as a more pure investigation of system and logic where output is almost incidental. It follows that “weak” generative art is then work that exploits computational processes to create complex art works in various media with a significant priority on the product of those processes.
In reality, I am not particularly concerned with expanding this argument, but let me add that I have always expressed a certain scepticism towards work that claims to be logically “pure” or objectively scientific. I think machine logic is a sexy idea that generally is a fantasy, given that the parameters of that logic is always defined by artists that are merely human. Thus their creations are usually full of the normal imperfections introduced by subjective bias that the artist is often less that conscious of.
