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.

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.

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.

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” 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).

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.

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: