Media Fractals

This is my latest animation, turning the entire world of media and internet into an endless animated recursive fractal. It’s actually a prototype of software I coded that generates in real time from a live feed. It’s all about turning information into art.

14 Paintings

“I blur things to make everything equally important and equally unimportant. I blur things so that they do not look artistic or craftsmanlike but technological, smooth and perfect. I blur things to make all the parts a closer fit. Perhaps I also blur out the excess of unimportant information.” – Gerhard Richter

Just a little experiment to extend Richter’s thoughts into the world of digital by using his original paintings as a starting point, outlining the creative potential of computer code to enhance and/or alter the process of painting and image creation. The technique takes random source points to create simple geometric shapes that are based on the underlying color palette. The placement of the shapes is based on mathematical and programming logic.

Most people only see the end result of digital work, ignoring the process. But the formal workings of digital art have parallels with the techniques and theoretical concerns of fine art, offering limitless possibilities.

In Search of iPad Art

Some of my work featured at the Armory Show/VOLTA in New York last week.

http://www.theatlanticwire.com/technology/2012/03/search-ipad-art/49863/

CSM and Vimeo present PROJECTiON at VOLTA NY featured in The New York Times.

Here’s the New York times article where I talk about my work in respect to the modern internet era versus the old museum era.  It’s an interview with me and Culture Shock Marketing (CSM) – my agency and the studio I’ll soon be heading up with.

This is the online version, the printed version is tomorrow on the 17th March.

Social Media as Inspiration and Canvas

By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER

MANY museums and art shows use social media to talk about art. But for some, social media is more than that — the videos and photos shared online are pieces of art themselves.

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art has a piece created from anonymous Flickr photos. The four Guggenheim Museums showed 25 YouTube videos selected by judges from the art world. And the Volta, N.Y., art fair this month exhibited videos uploaded to Vimeo, the video-sharing site.

For some curators and art collectors, the idea that social media postings constitute art is a logical reflection of the times.

“We think that art’s meant to characterize its time and explain what it’s like to be alive now,” said Hugh McGrory, creative director of Culture Shock Marketing, which curated the Volta show. “The art that sums up the present is on the Internet. It’s not in the galleries; it’s not in the museums.”

For others, these pieces raise an eternal question, asked as often today as when Picasso first showed his discombobulated nudes: What qualifies as art?

Video and computer art made by artists like Nam June Paik and Bill Viola have found homes in museums for decades. But the idea that anyone who uploads a video, photograph or even a Twitter posting to the Internet could be an artist is a controversial one, and there are few such works in museums.

“Part of it is educating the collecting base this is the bleeding edge of this work and moving image,” said Debra Anderson, chief executive of Culture Shock.

As artists create works online, the role of museums could forever change, because the works are available for anyone to view on their computers or cellphones, said David A. Ross, a professor at the School of Visual Arts and former director of the San FranciscoMOMA and the Whitney Museum.

“I’ve always believed, without any disrespect to museums and their purpose, that any art form that would create direct links between audience and viewers was wonderfully transgressive, insurgent, radical and necessary,” Mr. Ross said.

Instead of people relying on museums to show and tell them about important art, they are increasingly looking at pieces online and making that determination themselves, he said.

The role of museums that will outlive all others, he said, is preserving digital art, “so it is still available in 200 years the same way we look at paintings from 200 years ago and try to understand that world, that moment, that artist.”

For Mr. McGrory, the museum itself is an anachronism.

“Outside feels like an accelerated present taking us toward some exciting future, but once you step inside it feels like the past — it’s as if Twitter doesn’t exist, it’s as if Facebook never happened, it’s as if Pixar never happened,” he said.

To combat that, he showed the Vimeo videos at the Volta fair not just in the exhibit room, but also in the elevators that took viewers to the exhibit at the Ace Hotel and in the buses that transported them between exhibits.

The ability of artists, or even people with a camera and computer who don’t think of themselves as artists, to post their work online also changes the route that artworks take to museums.

Typically, an artist develops a relationship with a gallery owner, who shows the artist’s work and catches the attention of a museum curator. But as the Internet has done with many industries, it has the potential to cut out the middleman.

“The Internet’s just changed everything head over heels,” said Glenn Marshall, a video artist whose work was exhibited at the Volta show and will appear at the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, Germany, this spring. “I just put my work up on Vimeo and all it takes is one person who loves it to tell someone else.”

Vimeo, which is owned by the IAC/ InterActive Corporation, started as a way to share videos with detailed privacy controls and without ads in the video player, and like YouTube, it has its share of family videos of babies’ first steps.

But it quickly took off with artists because of tools like large video uploads and high-definition video sharing. Video creators often list their production tools below the film, and viewers ask them technical questions in the comments.

Artists use computer tools like animation, data visualization, Google Earth, Adobe software like Illustrator and a computer programming language called processing that was developed at M.I.T. for visual artists.

Mr. Marshall says that writing software is comparable to painting brushstrokes, and that a software application is a work of art.

Not everyone agrees with him. When he submitted to Apple an iPhone and iPad app based on his art called Zio, Apple rejected it because the company said it did not have functionality.

“I politely and calmly wrote back and said it has a higher functionality of art,” Mr. Marshall said. The app was approved.

The San Francisco MOMA has been grappling with the idea of online creations as art for years. Along with other museums, it has teamed with New Art Trust, a group that seeks to conserve electronic art. Benjamin Weil, a former curator, started a project to preserve Web sites as frozen moments.

Another of the museum’s pieces is a large, mesmerizingly beautiful yellow, orange and purple collection of photographs of suns that were posted on Flickr, the photo-sharing site.

It is titled “5,377,183 Suns from Flickr (Partial) 4/28/09,” based on the number of photos that the artist, Penelope Umbrico, found when she searched the Web site for the word “sunset.”

“Looking into this cool electronic space one finds a virtual window onto the natural world,” she wrote on her Web site.

The Ludwig Museum is curating an exhibit on land art, which is typically created in nature using natural materials. It will include a piece by Mr. Marshall called “The Nest That Sailed the Sky” that uses animation to show birth, life and decay.

“Glenn Marshall’s film is a sort of a missing link between the very beginnings of the land-art development and new tendencies within our exhibition,” said Beate Reifenscheid, the show’s curator.

Whether these works qualify as art is a question that will be determined by curators, gallery owners and art viewers over time.

The more important question is whether the works are good, said Terry Barrett, the author of “Why Is That Art?” and a professor of art education at the University of North Texas. If they are, people will view them, whether online or in a museum.

“I can see many art worlds — the art world existing on the Web and in local communities and in New York,” he said.

 

 

 

‘Old Da Vinci’ Art Cam mode

Latest painting mode implemented in my Art Cam app, giving the look of an old cracked oil painting.

The shots of the park and trees make use of a an exposure lock feature I just built in too – I can point the phone to a bright part of the sky, lock the exposure, and then recompose the shot lower down on some shaded glade areas in the trees – picking up some nice shadows and warm evening greens and highlights.

Suprisingly I’m still not playing around with colorzing the palette – the painting algorithms seem to do a good job of taking the actual image from the camera and reproducing the colors in an artistic way without actually changing the color. One aspect of this is perhaps how the video noise (fluxuations in RGB values based on thermal interference etc) combined with the space/color averaging technique from my Mosaic code, are naturally creating an artistic impression of the colors.

I’m having a lot of fun going about taking snaps like this, as immediate ‘paintings’.  You’re constantly looking at the world through an impression of it, which subtly is synthesizing the notion of art and photography.  Painters after all strive to give an impression of the real world through the veil of brush strokes and color mixing.  Why shouldn’t computer algorithms be doing the same?