A couple of pictures from the Nuit Blanche, London, Ontario

The London Nuit Blanche, part of the Fringe Festival, took place on the evening of June 18th, 2011. The activities that took place at London Museum are described here:

http://www.londonmuseum.on.ca/programsevents/nuitblanche/

The evening went well, with large numbers of visitors. I found the experimental music stimulating, and it interacted with my work in an interesting way.  My Vision Persist program was showing on the ground floor throughout the evening. This work generates simple abstract paintings whose colours bleed into each other over time – creating stains and blooms of new colours which spread across the “canvas”. Viewers were able to draw into the canvas themselves by using a mouse on a podium – so they could influence the evolution of the painting by adding their own coloured shapes which would then continue to evolve and affect the colours around them.

People seemed to find the work easy and enjoyable to interact with –   I saw people of all ages having a play with it.  My only criticism was that the program ran a bit slowly, only updating at about 5 frames per second. In terms of the evolution of the painting, I didn’t have a problem with this, as it created a sort of slow, meditative feeling. However, as the users’ drawing had to wait for the screen updates, drawing wasn’t very smooth. If you confined your drawing to a smallish area to create blobs it worked well, but users who tried to create rapid lines and swirls found the lines would break up into a series of unconnected points.  I need to have the screen updates and the drawings running in separate threads – so that even when the screen is updating at a low framerate, drawing can still take place at a high framerate.

Vision Persist at Nuit Blanche, London, Ontario

Vision Persist, an interactive, abstract projection, will be showing at the Hide & Seek, Show & Tell event which is part of the Nuit Blanche art evening in London, Ontario.  Saturday 18th June, starts 9pm, finishes 3 am. The space will also feature live music, zine tables, and art workshops.  http://museumlondon.ca/programsevents/nuitblanche/

Collager

A new program that generates random collages by selecting random parts of images and drawing them on top of each other. The program runs continuously, blending new image parts over the existing composition. All images were sourced from the web from open, public websites. The images were obtained “randomly” by doing image searches using words randomly selected from a dictionary. Images were chosen that were the right size and orientation and which fitted certain criteria. They all had to be unaltered photos and not hand-drawn, computer-generated or manipulated images. They were also selected for interesting composition and subject matter – so it is a sort of semi-random process. Image contents and subjects that I would not have thought of without the random process have been obtained – but I have exercised some choice about what sorts of images, compositions, and image fragments will work well in the program.

At the moment the program uses this library of images on the hard drive. I would like to find some way to allow the program to search for and find its own images on the web. I have a prototype for this, and it works, but not very well.  If anyone has any ideas about how to do this well, let me know. It’s possible that the library of pre-downloaded images is actually a better choice – as it can make more interesting comments on the relationships between ourselves, our shared images, and the world due to the more careful selection. I’ll need a lot more of these images, though, as at the moment you see image fragments repeat a bit too often.

gallery modernarts

I have a couple of works up at gallery modernarts in London Ontario, which specialises in abstract works. The works are unique framed prints which are outputs of two different abstract painting generators.

London Ontario Digital Arts Society

I’m starting up a new society here in London, Ontario: London Ontario Digital Arts Society (or “digital arts london”). The purpose is to share information about current work, events and opportunities. The forum will also allow us to arrange collaborations and give advice, mentoring or technical assistance to other members.

I’ve started a Yahoo group for the society: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/digitalartslondon/

At the moment the group has a lonely two members, but I hope to see it grow over time. Please pass this message on to anyone in London or nearby who might be interested.

Optical Pop – New Zealand Film Archive

There will be a screening of abstract video works by NA Royal, Johnny Titheridge and myself at The New Zealand Film Archive, Wellington, New Zealand, on 3rd November 2010, at 7 pm. See here for details.

Four Winds abstract painting generator

I have created a new abstract painting generation algorithm which chooses colours according to certain colour harmonies, arrranges the starting elements in a (somewhat) random manner, and then evolves the painting gradually over time using the Four Winds algorithm. I’m very pleased with this work as it not only creates interesting colour/texture/composition combinations, but the colours continue to be pushed around into new combinations as the program runs. It changes slowly, but it’s interesting to watch if you enjoy this sort of thing.

The initial colour harmonies are based on colour theory,  with monochromatic, complementary, colour triads and so on – with a lot of random variation in the colours and some extra colours sometimes thrown in randomly. The number of colours is kept integral (8, 16, 64 or 128), and the colours used are stored in arrays and then drawn on when the “initial seed painting” is drawn. This is analogous to a painting process where the artist mixes the colours he needs before starting painting. The evolution process cannot create any new colours – no blending occurs. This keeps the painting surface pretty flat and digital-looking, which I like.

I like digital paintings that look like digital paintings. There’s no need to try and draw on the prestige of a “superior” medium by trying to emulate its effects. No, these paintings are unashamedly digital.

I have kept the gamut of variability pretty wide on these paintings – so the colour harmonies are not too tightly programmed. So some surprising colour combinations can still occur (not always pretty!).

Four Winds – generative image evolver

I’m quite excited by this program as it addresses some of the concerns I have with generative art I have seen in the past, which I talked about in my last post. Starting from a single image, this program shifts colours around from place to place, creating what appear to be competing colonies of colour which grow, move around, and die off over time, almost like fungal or bacterial colonies in a petri-dish. It’s very pleasing to watch this run and see just how long it will run for, creating surprising and interesting compositions from the original colour palette of the image.

“Four Winds” refers to the four drawing methods which are essentially competing against each other in the picture frame. What is drawn in a particular area of the image depends on the hue that is already there, but also on an internal “clock” in the program (360 degrees, which advances one degree every second). It is this clock which creates the cyclic nature of the transformations. Without this feature, one colour would outcompete the others quite quickly. The effect of the “clock” is to create a cyclical changing selection pressure which drives the composition through its cyclic (but never repeating) phases.

You can see the program running here . Use keys 1-4 to select the seed image. ‘R’ resets to the original image, keeping the current seed image.

Screenshots: below we see the starting “seed image”, followed by some phases of evolution (each a few minutes apart).

More thoughts on generative drawing programs

I observed in my last post that many of the generative drawing/painting programs I have seen tend to have similar characteristics. The “wow” factor on first seeing it, being impressed by the cleverness and novel behaviour of the program (and often, also, by how high the frame-rate is) followed, after a few minutes, by boredom, as you realise you have already seen everything the program has to offer. In many cases these programs are made by people with backgrounds in programming, rather than art or design, and their goal is to achieve just this – a novel, elegant visual effect achieved with the minimum amount of code. These are beautiful visualisations of mathematical structures – which lack something (for me).

I have a Fine Arts background, and my main interests are in colour and abstraction. Creating an abstract painting with colour, composition and texture that is complex enough to hold sustained attention, and yet unified enough to not look too contrived, is quite challenging and enjoyable. When you add the time-dimension to this in a generative work, you are faced with a daunting task – the complexity goes up because you have a whole extra dimension to deal with – and the possibilities (which were already infinite), swell to another order of magnitude. How can I deal with all the usual “problems” of abstract painting, but also deal with the fact that the work is changing/transforming over time?

There are so many possibilities, and I explored some of them in my Digital Phenomena exhibition in Wellington, New Zealand last year.  All of this work was pre-generated – videos presented either as large-scale projections or on TV monitors – but the principles of “abstraction that changes over time” are the same. Some of these works were like abstract paintings that simply morphed from state to state – which felt like a sort of narrative progression. Others were more like  sort of unitary compositions that went through different oscillations or phases – but the “same object” was present the whole time.  Some of the works had sound, which was either very strongly (algorithmically) linked to the video, or serving as a sort of “soundtrack” for it. Other works presented a sort of “fixed frame” in which activity took place – like a frame which can only see part of the “abstract universe” which it is observing.

But, back to the discussion of programming art. The simple, elegant generative work is like a “sketch”, an great little idea which is ready to be incorporated into a larger work.  The finished work should have what I will refer to as “time complexity”. Over time, significant and surprising changes should occur, rewarding sustained viewing. This does not necessarily have to arise in some clever way out of an elegant, unified algorithm. It could be a really complicated, ugly algorithm that nonetheless achieves the desired result –  a work that is capable of changing tack, moving into different states which contrast with the ones that came before.

These states can be explicitly programmed – “every 60 seconds randomly change into a different state”, for example, or, “if screen colour characteristics reach <condition> change into state x”. A program like this can become quite complicated, certainly not elegant. It is always checking to see if certain conditions have been met, and if they have it flips into  different modes. It is this complexity of rules which are known to the programmer but not to the viewer which creates the “unpredictability” that make the work interesting to watch. For someone who likes the elegant, well-crafted programs, this probably seems ugly and unsatisfying, because their aims are different from mine – I don’t want to create some glittering internal algorithmic structure – programming is just a tool for me. In a way, my programs “cheat” by having some sort of staging behind the scenes rather than using clever mathematics for the complexity to arise out of. And, from what I have seen, the clever mathematics fails to create interesting art – it creates interesting visualisations of beautiful mathematical structures – which I enjoy looking at – but it doesn’t have the gritty, down-to-earth contextuality  - the human element – I am searching for.

Daily Compositions

I’ve been spending a bit more time using the best computer available to me to generate some new “paintings”.  You just can’t beat the brain when it comes to drawing.  So connected – to emotions, vast amounts of knowledge and experience and history – which for an artist includes an awareness of historical art practices.

Even though all drawing, even doing so by writing computer programs, is, of course, using the brain to create drawings,  an algorithm is like a crystallised process, perhaps beautiful and elegant, but incapable of any spontaneity or flexibility. Even the cleverest generative art programs I have seen become predictable quite quickly. In the first few seconds you say “wow”, but after two minutes you are bored.  I’ll be thinking about how to do better than this myself – more on this soon in another post.

So spending some time drawing is a good break from writing programs that produce drawings. I’m keeping to a discipline of the “daily composition”. There are no rules for the composition – no maximum or minimum time spent, no standards of completeness, particular aesthetic goal, or anything like that. The only rule is that there is a daily composition which is worked on seriously until I’ve had enough of it or feel it has reached some kind of end-point.

I use Corel Painter X for the drawings – it has so many different drawing tools giving it a flexibility and spontaneity that’s quite addictive. It works well with my Wacom tablet too (essential for doing any computer-aided drawing). Here end the product placements (I wish they were – then they might pay me something for promoting them!)

Here is today’s “composition”, drawn this afternoon:

I’m sure the many fans of this blog will be wondering why I haven’t posted for a while. Well, I’ve been having a bit of a rest, and not pushing so hard for the next “big idea” to arrive. Over the last year I’ve done some work I’m really pleased with, but I haven’t had the chance to exhibit it yet (for various reasons). I started doing graphics programs with the idea of creating some sort of abstract painting generator, and with the latest one I felt I’d achieved something really interesting – so having reached the destination the wind went out of my sails a bit. I realised my creative energies had become a bit burnt out so I decided to shift into a lower gear for a little while.  Also, a lot of the work I’ve been doing over the past year has been technical investigations. I now feel pretty comfortable with programming as an art practice – I have enough knowledge to do what I want, or I know how to find out how to do it. But at the moment I don’t have any really exciting ideas, from the heart, about what to do with these new skills.

One thing I have been playing around with in the meantime is the Arduino microcontroller. This microcontroller has attracted a huge following, and the programming language and libraries are really well developed, so the board is pretty easy to use.

I built a “robot” that turns and move towards the light, using an old RC car I got from the thrift shop, the arduino, and a few other components. One circuit board has four photoresistors allowing the car to determine which direction the light is  coming from most strongly. The other has an H-Bridge chip which controls the two motors in the car (one for driving, one for steering). The H-Bridge chip allows you to use the batteries in the car to drive the motors (the arduino can’t switch that much current), and to run them in forward or reverse. The arduino runs a program I wrote which determines the direction of the light and then moves/turns accordingly. It works OK, but because the car moves quite fast and doesn’t turn that sharply, it doesn’t work that well in my small house.

This was an exercise for me, to figure out how to use sensors and motors and make something happen in the “physical world” as opposed to the virtual world inside the computer (that is why they call this “Physical Computing”). Now that I have done the exercise I am satisfied that I understand how to use and program the microcontroller.  I may do some sort of sculptural work that reacts to its environment later – when I think of something that excites me.

If anyone is interested in the details of how this works, let me know. It was a learning exercise for me and I am happy to share any details that might help other people playing around with this sort of thing.

Genetic 8

Latest version of the genetic algorithm abstract painting generator. I’ve removed lines and arcs as they tend to create a lot of small lines with a range of different colours which can look quite horrible. This version just uses rectangles, ellipses, brushstrokes and scribbles (plus some filter-type effects).  I think it looks much more painterly.

Genetic Algorithm Painting Generator – new version

I’ve added some more organic/painterly methods to this program – a “scribble”,  and a “brush”. In addition, all drawing methods can now either draw over the top of existing colours, or draw with the colour found at the starting point of the new element. I call this latter method “draw from” as opposed to “draw over”. It allows existing shapes to become degraded as colours adjacent to them are picked up and drawn across them.

Sound-Driven Abstraction

I’ve taken the Vision Persist program, and made it sound-driven. The Vision Persist program originally put basic shapes on the screen in a grid of squares, and blended them over time to create some really interesting colour combinations. The user could also draw in the grid to create areas of colour which would interact with what was already there.  I toyed with the idea of making it respond to motion, using a camera to detect the motion and thus create marks in the composition.  This seemed unsatisfactory as a “user interface”, though, as this work is all about colour, and the user would not be able to select a specific colour through their motions. Even some sophisticated analysis of gestures wouldn’t be very intuitive for the user.

Because this program uses the vision-persist colour-blending, even when there is no sound and no new elements are being generated, it still continues to blend the squares in an interesting way.  I kind of like the idea that abstract compositions are constantly being generated, and that the relationship to the sound might seem subtle at first. Once you know, of course, you can experiment with making different sounds varying in pitch, volume and duration, to affect the composition.

Sound is more satisfactory –  different pitches create different colours – and volumes of different frequencies affect the rate at which specific elements are drawn. Overall amplitude affects the size of the elements that are drawn.  This is quite fun to play with. You do feel that your speech and sounds are being rendered in shapes and colours (in a simple way).

Written in Processing using the excellent Minim sound library.

A couple of little programs…

I haven’t really been doing anything I’m that excited about since the genetic algorithm painting program. Since then I have been playing more with Processing and openframeworks (and a little bit with arduino). I’ve also been working through some of the stuff in Joshua Noble’s “Programming Interactivity” book. This book has a lot of meat in it – so many things to play with I haven’t really known where to start.

I have written a couple of little programs that are sort of learning experiments. Firstly, the “Ruin 2″ program I wrote in Processing, which was challenging as I had to figure out some rotation mathematics.  You can play with this program here: http://www.openprocessing.org/visuals/?visualID=7364

A program I just “finished” (may develop it more) is called Genetic Blobs. Blobs have their own characteristics, and can mate and produce offspring which inherit these characteristics from their parents (crossover). Blobs have a random mutation rate, so blobs with novel combinations of characteristics can arise. This is the first program (besides exercises) I have written in openframeworks.  You can read more about the program and get the code here:

http://www.openframeworks.cc/forum/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=3368

ofxFBOTexture???

I started to re-write the genetic algorithm painting program in openframeworks, but got stuck as I couldn’t find an equivalent to one of the things I was doing in Processing.

There is a method in the Processing program that takes a PImage, draws on it (random elements clustered in certain ways), and returns a new PImage. This is how the mutations are generated. Because you can’t draw rects, lines etc. on a PImage, it is necessary, within the method, to copy the PImage to a PGraphics object. The drawing then takes place on this object, which is then copied back to a new PImage, which is returned by the method.

I have been trying to find an equivalent to this in openframeworks. I think that ofxFBOTexture might be equivalent to PGraphics, and I know that you can draw rects, lines etc on one, but I’m not sure how you copy the pixels from an ofImage into one.

If anyone knows, please help me – commenting here, or by answering the question I posted on the openframeworks forum.

openframeworks….

I’m currently converting the program below (genetic algorithm painting generator) into openframeworks, which is C++ based  (Processing is Java-based). It might take me a while to get everything going, but it’s worth it as an exercise to learn openframeworks, which is much faster for certain types of project (e.g. real time video processing). The genetic program will probably run much faster in openframeworks, too. We’ll see.

I also like C++ better as you can compile to native code for your OS,  and easily send these programs to other people without having to worry about whether they have the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) properly installed. How easy it is to develop programs in openframeworks compared to Processing… I guess I am going to find out.

Tweaked genetic algorithm abstract painting generator

I fixed the algorithm which wasn’t handling colour properly, and changed the fitness parameters a bit. I quite like the images this program is producing now.

Genetic algorithm painting generator (updated)

I’ve refined the algorithm somewhat,  so that rather than the overall granularity being maximised in the fitness function, the range of granularities in the picture is optimised. This creates more variation in the painting – a mixture of areas densely covered with lines, and areas of pure colour.

Genetic algorithm abstract painting generator

This program starts with a few randomly coloured rectangles and circles, and then generates a large number of mutations. The “best” mutation is then selected, and displayed, and used to generate the next set of mutations. This process continues indefinitely, creating a series of abstract paintings. The fitness function, which determines which of the mutations is the “best”, is based on a certain level of contrast, colour variation, and granularity in the painting.

I’m on holiday at the moment, so only have an old, slow laptop to work on. Thus the program is running in quite low resolution, and doesn’t generate as many mutations per generation as I would like. Still, as a basic prototype, I’m pretty pleased with how well it works. I’ll be refining and developing this further next year.

OpenProcessing

I’ve been writing a few little programs and posting them on the OpenProcessing website. This is a fantastic resource where you can post your programs as applets people can run – along with the source code so they can see how it works. All the programs are in the Processing language, of course, as that is the focus of the site. Every now and then I will look at an interesting program, which is doing something more sophisticated than my own efforts, and really study the code and get a grip on how it works (most of the time – sometimes I am baffled).  I always learn a lot from this – if you really can’t figure something out you can post a comment on the program and the author will usually help you out.  I have posted a few of my own small programs on here – an orbital simulator, and something with charged particles which chase each other around the screen, and a couple of other things. It’s good to give something back….

My “portfolio” is here : http://www.openprocessing.org/portal/?userID=3415

Colour Mutator (source)

I have posted the “Colour Mutator” program on the OpenProcessing website,  so anyone can now play with it and look at the code, if they are interested. This program originally had an interface with a colour chooser and the ability to draw rectangles as well as freehand lines – but I have simplified it to use the same “interface” as Vision Persist 4 – just click and drag and you get a random colour each time. http://www.openprocessing.org/visuals/?visualID=6266

Vision Persist 4

I’ve modified the Vision Persist program I mentioned earlier so that it starts by putting up some simple geometric shapes and areas on the screen which then gradually blend into each other over time, creating a variety of subtle shades of  colour  in the process. In addition, the user can draw on the screen to create his/her own coloured areas which will then also evolve and affect surrounding colours in the same way.

From my last experience with the “Colour Mutator” work, I decided to keep the “user interface” very simple – whenever the mouse is clicked on the screen a random colour is chosen, which the user can draw with until the mouse is released. Pressing down again gives a new random colour. I could have other drawing tools, a colour chooser, and so on… but what I found last time was that having an interface which is too complicated discourages interaction.  The interface I have here is the simplest possible – and it does still allow the user to create coloured areas and interact with the evolving artwork. If you don’t like the drawing colour chosen, you can just keep clicking until you get a colour you do like. I find this interesting and satisfying to use myself.

There is also the possibility of using either sound or motion detection from a video camera to allow the user to draw on the screen using their body rather than having to use a mouse. This is more desirable in a gallery situation – a large scale projection that people can interact with by simply moving around in front of, rather than having to use a device. It’s as simple and pared down as possible. This is something I will be looking into in the near future.

Here’s a couple of before/after shots – of the program just after starting, and after a few minutes of evolution:

Gui for Abstract Painting Generator

I’m just finisihing a Gui for the interactive version of the abstract painting generator. It uses a separate JFrame with radio buttons, sliders and checkboxes – all Java Swing components. I had heard (on the Processing forums) that there are sometimes problems mixing Swing components with Processing sketches, but I haven’t encountered any of them. Maybe because I just imported the classes I needed (e.g JRadioButton), rather than importing the whole Swing library? Anyway, it’s quite tedious adding all those components and listeners, but it’s going to be really fun to play around with once it’s finished.

Vision Persist

This is a quite strange program I developed a few months ago where you can draw small squares on the screen and the colour sort of grows and stains into the underlying colours, in quite a beautiful way. I stopped developing this because even though I really liked it, I couldn’t think how to categorise it, or move it forward. As a generative artwork, it can move in a particular direction where the computer program draws the coloured squares itself which then evolve according to the rules. As a toy/game, it can be interactive, where you can draw in various colours and watch the added colours spreading like an ink stain across the canvas. Maybe it could be both generative and interactive? I will be playing with this more, to try to figure out where to take it.

 

Interactive Abstract Painting Generator

I have updated the abstract generator so that all parameters can be controlled using the keyboard. A separate JFrame (window) provides text reporting on parameter levels. The interactive version allows the parameter levels to be tuned precisely to create interesting new compositions.

It also gives the application the ability to be used performatively (though I don’t think I would do this). Next – I might build a gui with sliders, radio buttons etc. in the separate reporting window to allow easier control and display of parameter levels.

Updated colour-handling algorithm for Generator.

Another surprising composition generated.

I was surprised by the texture of this one, which was created when a particular drawing mode of the Generator program coincided with drawing the elements at a very small scale.

It just gets better and better….

…though I say it myself. I’m continuing to refine the abstract painting generator.

Abstract Painting Generator

I’ve just finished a program that generates abstract paintings endlessly, continually adding new elements with varied textures and colors over what is already there, so the composition and colour/texture relationships are always changing.  I was thinking about how this could be viewed as a sort of critique of abstract painting – a sort of proof of its meaninglessness,  as a computer program can generate an infinite number of compositions, many of which look really interesting. This doesn’t really hold up, though as it is actually more constructed than it really looks, with many aesthetic decisions and fine tuning/tweaking carried out by the programmer (me), to get it to work in a pleasing way. The other point is that people do bring their own meaning and associations to abstract work, and this has positive and negative aspects. The successful abstract work is evocative, though what it evokes could be different from person to person.

This is quite a sensual work, and it has the ability to excite me with the unexpected contrasts and compositions it sometimes generates. It makes me realise how conservative (stuck in a rut) I can be when composing a picture, with color and with composition.  Some of the program’s compositions are quite chaotic, and even jarring – but  every now and then it throws up something startling, or beautiful. It’s those moments that I wait for as I watch it evolve, and they tell me something about my own aesthetic ideas, as opposed to what I just respond to viscerally. I can see something which makes me think “That looks really cool, but I never would have thought of it”.

This program is largely finished, but I am still tweaking various aspects.

Colour Mutator installation pictures

Colour Mutator was the work I showed at the “Strata” exhibition at Enjoy Gallery, in June. Here’s a couple of pictures of how it looked when it was installed. Images by Jeremy Booth – thanks! There’s more information about this exhibtion at http://www.enjoy.org.nz/node/11

GridPaint

This program consists of a simple grid of coloured squares, whose colours are replaced gradually with new ones.  The overall composition goes through various phases over time. The work is generative, and runs endlessly. As the work enters new phases, they mix with the old ones, creating a never-ending series of colour compositions, which can be pleasing or garish, obvious, or subtle. This work is all about colour, colour relationships, and the aesthetics of colour.

Designed for large-scale projection, but not yet exhibited.

More ShapePainting

I had one of the Shapepaint files printed onto good quality paper with a bit of a texture. I’m amazed by the radiance of the colours, and how painterly it looks. It also prints well to quite a large scale, considering that the original file is only 1280×1024 resolution (but it is an uncompressed TIFF, not a jpeg, which probably helps). I think I can put an exhibition together of these printed works. I learnt a new term: giclée – meaning producing works in such a fashion – using high quality ink-jet printers to produce art works. These printers use colour-fast, archival quality ink, and can print onto a variety of textures, such as the one I used which is similar to watercolour paper.

I’m still experimenting with the Shapepaint software I wrote. It has a lot of different settings you can control – almost every key on the keyboard toggles something or adjusts the level of a particular parameter. It’s a lot of fun to compose pictures with it because it feels very experimental, as you combine different parameter levels with different types of motion to produce new textures you hadn’t see before. Very absorbing. There’s no “undo”, so if you screw up, you’re stuck with it.

Here’s some recent ones:

Ten New Drawings

ShapePaint

I wrote this program in the Processing language, which is basically a specialised version of Java. If you’re just going to use Java to do graphics stuff, you might as well use a version where people have written the graphics-handling libraries in an efficient and easy-to use way – and Processing is really well set up for this.

The ShapePaint program basically just moves rectangles and ellipses around, but has a large number of keyboard controls to change the colours, speed, rotational speed, dimensions, opacity, and so on, of the elements. You have some control of the movement of the shapes and their colours, but not total control. It can be frustrating to use, but then it is somewhat unpredictable too.

I’m interested in writing drawing tools myself – so that the creation of a specific and idiosyncratic tool becomes part of the creation of the work itself – rather than using commercially available drawing software – some of which is really amazing, and I do enjoy using it (especially with a drawing tablet). It is intended for use by designers and illustrators who need an exquisite level of control to achieve a specific end. It is also designed to mimic natural media, and does it amazingly well in some cases. That is all well and good, but what does a computer drawing tool that isn’t trying to look like oil paint, pastel or watercolour look like? I’m still refining the shapePaint program, but I’m enjoying the results – things I probably wouldn’t come up with using other software.

Here’s some of my ShapePaint drawings:

Making Love to the Audience (May 2008)

One of my short films “one bit v2″ was screened at one of Eve Gordon’s “Making Love to the Audience” evenings at The Dust Palace in Auckland.

http://www.thedustpalace.co.nz/making-love-to-the-audience

Hey Student! Exhibition 2007

This was an exhibition of student work at The Film Archive (Wellington) in 2007, when I was in my fourth and final year of the BFA degree. I had one work  in this exhibition, “Ringscape”, which was described as a “digital kinetic sculpture” by reviewer Mark Amery in the Dominion Post newspaper. The soundtrack was generated using software which translates images into sound, and the imagery was generated using through software which can be set up to generate video from analysis of the sound data. So the sound was generated by an image, and that sound was then used to generate video. The result is a piece of work in which the sound and video correspond very closely – or appear to be the same thing. You can “hear” the video, or “see” the sound. This relates to the idea of synaesthesia – where one type of sensory input is experienced as another – e.g. sounds are experienced as different colours.

In addition to the Dominion Post review there was an online review by David Cauchi on ArtBash: http://www.artbash.co.nz/article.asp?id=1122

Artist’s Film Festival (2008)

Artist’s Film Festival – 2008.  Showed at The Film Archive (Wellington), and The Physics Room (Christchurch), and supposedly at Govett-Brewster Art Gallery (New Plymouth), though I couldn’t find any record of this. I had two short films in the festival, both of which were works I completed in the fourth and final year of my BFA at Massey, Wellington. For more information about this exhibition,  see http://www.physicsroom.org.nz/gallery/2008/aff/

Some stills from Digital Phenomena exhibition

People keep telling me that the stills from these works are really interesting in their own right, and that I should exhibit them, produce them in some manner to be sale-able.

Digital Phenomena (May 2009)

Digital Phenomena exhibition at Toi Poneke gallery, Wellington, New Zealand, May 2009. This was my first solo exhibtion, and, as the title suggests, was composed entirely of digital works. I had a darkspace with a frosted perspex backprojection screen hanging in the centre, and three works with sound were playing consecutively in there. In these three works the visuals were generated from the soundtracks themselves, creating a close, almost synaesthetic relationship between sound and imagery. The soundtracks themselves were composed with a mixture of techniques – recording, synthesising and layering sounds to create what I would refer to as “abstract sound” – which had cyclic, rhythmic qualities, but not really melodic qualities (I wouldn’t call it music).

In the rest of the gallery I had TV screens playing various works on loops – and a large scale projection with headphones where visitors could select works to view using a DVD menu. Most of the works in this lighted part of the gallery were silent.

The work in this exhibition was all made between late 2007 and early 2009.  I got some good publicity for this exhibition – I was interviewed on Radio Active’s “Caffeine and Aspirin” arts show, and there was also an article on the exhibition in The Wellingtonian newspaper, as well as a lot of web promotion.

Wellington City Council website exhibition article: http://www.wellington.govt.nz/news/display-item.php?id=3484

New video work

This work resulted from experimentation with a special camera, combined with various abstraction techniques in software. The result is 3 hours of abstract video that transforms sometimes slowly, sometimes rapidly, going through many different phases of colour and form. I see this as an abstract painting that moves and changes over time. It’s unlikely anyone would watch it for the full 3 hours – as it doesn’t really have a narrrative structure. It would be shown in a gallery setting where people could watch it for as long as it interested them.  I’m still looking for somewhere suitable to show this work as I’m quite excited about it.

Strata Exhibition at Enjoy Gallery

This exhibition ran from 18th-28th June, 2009, and was associated with the 6th Aotearoa Digital Arts Symposium being held at Victoria University School of Design at the same time. I had one piece of work in the exhibition, an interactive program called Colour Mutator. Left to its own devices, the program generated coloured blobs of pixels which grew and changed colours over time. The user could also draw rectangles or freehand with a pen/drawing tablet to create coloured shapes which would then mutate over time according to the same rules.

Successful? I felt it was, to some extent. It definitely started me thinking about what sort of user interface works for a gallery setting, so that people can easily use the work and not be intimidated. And also about the dissolving of the boundaries between “artist” and “viewer” in this sort of work. How do you have meaningful interaction while still retaining some control over the “content” of the work? Why have interactivity at all? I guess I want to make some sort of system that can be explored by playing with it, not just looking at it.

More information about the exhibition at http://www.enjoy.org.nz/node/951