tag: Generative

Idle Animation (working title) is an artwork that aims to reclaim public space through slowness and meditating on a single moment.

Public space in cities is on the decline, and nowhere is this truer than in Birmingham and London, the respective homes of the artists.

In city centres rest is discouraged. Public seating is rare and purposefully uncomfortable as to remind you to not stay still for too long. Any opportunity for rest is tied to commercial activity e.g. purchasing something from the bar, or a seat on a train.

A Perfect Circle is a performative drawing piece that examines the interactions between humans and computers.

In this video I attempt to draw three basic shapes - circle, square, and triangle - something which is easily accomplished using computers. A colour-tracking script attempts to capture this and then presents the results to me, which enables me to rectify my mistakes.

This constant interfacing with the script reveals not only the errors in my ability to draw “perfect” shapes but also the imperfections of the script in analysing my movements.

For my performance with Freecode as part of Network Music Festival I wanted to move away from producing visuals that consisted mostly of video playback and move towards generative art. Demos of this were posted on my Flickr site, and the first performance that utilised this new approach happened on 26th January

The feedback from people online and at the performance was really positive, with a lot of people were asking how to do something similar. The patch I made for it was very messy so I (albeit slowly) remade part of the patch that achieves that effect. It’s available for download below

Inspired by Alvin Lucier’s I Am Sitting in a Room piece I have taken Dataface one step further. In glitch art we only ever see result of the process of damaging an image, video or sound. Rarely can we observe this process as it happens within the computer in an instant. Using Alvin Lucier’s 1969 piece I Am Sitting in a Room as inspiration, in this piece I show the many steps taken to damage data to the point where it loses all meaning. Font files are files that attribute a style to the otherwise plain text that we see on screen. The computer treats this only as an attribute of the text and can understand it regardless of what font file is used or how it looks to the viewer. In this piece I have used a script, created in collaboration with G Bulmer, that explores the font file and damages it by randomising the values that construct each glyph. The computer, doing only what it has been instructed to do, continually attacks the font files’ data to the point where it is sometimes corrupted and not even it can interpret it correctly. The resulting video shows the gradual damaging of the data. The viewer will struggle to find meaning amongst the visual noise whilst the computer still understands it.