Posts Tagged ‘generative art’

I’m working on Aleph Null 2.0. You can view what I have so far at vispo.com/alephTouch/an.html . If you’re familiar with version 1.0, you can see that what 2.0 creates looks different from what 1.0 creates. I’ve learned a lot about the HTML5 canvas. Here are some recent screenshots from Aleph Null 2.0.

 

Ted Warnell, as many of you know, is a Canadian net artist originally from Vancouver, long since living in Alberta, who has been producing net art as programmed visual poetry at warnell.com since the 90’s. Which is about how long we’ve been in correspondence with one another. Ted was very active on Webartery for some time, an email list in the 90’s that many of the writerly net artists were involved in. We’ve stayed in touch over the years, though we’ve never met in the same room. We have, however, met ‘face-to-face’ via video chat.

He’s still creating interesting net art. In the nineties and oughts, his materials were largely bitmaps, HTML, CSS, and a little JavaScript. Most of his works were stills, or series thereof. Since about 2013, he’s been creating net works using the HTML5 canvas tag that consist entirely of JavaScript. The canvas tag lets us program animations and stills on HTML pages without needing any plugins such as Flash or Unity. Ted has never liked plugins, so the canvas tag works well for him for a variety of reasons. Ted has created a lot of very interesting canvas-based, programmed animations and stills at warnell.com/mona .

I’m always happy to get a note from Ted showing me new work he’s done. Since we both are using the canvas, we talk about the programming issues it involves and also the sorts of art we’re making. Below is an email Ted sent me recently after I asked him how he would describe the ‘look’ or ‘looks’ he’s been creating with his canvas work. If you have a good look at warnell.com/mona , you see that his work does indeed exhibit looks you will remember and identify as Warnellian.

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hey jim,

further to earlier thoughts about your query re “looks” in my work (and assuming that you’re still interested by this subject), here is something that has been bubbling up over the past week or so

any look in my work comes mainly from the processes used in creation of the work – so, it’s not a deliberate or even a conscious thing, the look, but rather, it just is – mainly, but not entirely, of course – subject, too, is at least partly responsible for the way these things look

have been thinking this past week that what is deliberate and conscious is my interest in the tension between and balance of order and chaos, by which i mean mathematics (especially geometry, visual math) and chance (random, unpredictable) – i’m exploring these things and that tension/balance in almost all of my works – you, too, explore and incorporate these things into many of your works including most strikingly in aleph null, and also in globebop and others

so here are some thoughts about order/chaos and balance/tension in no particular order:

works using these things function best when the balance is right – then the tension is strong – and then the work also is “right” and strong

it is not a requirement that both of these things are apparent (visible or immediately evident) in a work – there are some notable examples of works that seem to be all one or the other, though that may be more illusion than reality – works of jackson pollock seem to be all chaos but still balance with a behind-the-scenes intelligence, order – works by andrew wyeth on the other hand seem to be all about order and control, but look closely at the brushstrokes that make all of that detail and you’ll see that many of these are pure chance – brilliant stuff, really

an artist whose work intrigues me much of late is quebecer claude tousignant – i’m sure you know of him – he is perhaps best known for his many “target” paintings of concentric rings – tousignant himself referred to these as “monochromatic transformers” and “gongs” – you can find lots of his works at google images

the reason tousignant is so interesting to me (again) at this time is because while i can see that his paintings “work”, i cannot for the life of me see where he is doing anything even remotely relating to order/chaos or the balance/tension of same – his works seem to me to be truly all order/order with no opposite i would consider necessary for balance and/or to make (required) tension – his works defy me and i’d love to understand how he’s doing it 🙂

anyway, serious respect, more power, and many more years to the wonderful monsieur tousignant

Look Again – warnell.com/mona/look.htm

is a new (this week) autointeractive work created with claude tousignant and his target paintings in mind

in this work are three broad rings, perfectly ordered geometric circles, each in the same randomly selected single PbN primary color – the space between and surrounding these rings is filled with a randomly generated (60/sec), randomly spun alphanumeric text in black and white, and also gray thanks to xor compositing – alinear chaos – as the work progresses, the three rings are gradually overcome by those relentless spinning texts – the outermost ring is all but obliterated while the middle ring is chipped away bit by bit until only a very thin inner crust of the ring remains – the third innermost ring, tho, is entirely unaffected

as the work continues to evolve, ghostlike apparitions of the missing outer and middle ring become more and more pronounced… because… within the chaos, new rings in ever-sharper black and white are beginning to emerge – this has the effect of clearly defining (in gray and tinted gray) the shape of the original color rings – even as order is continually attacked and destroyed by chaos, chaos is simultaneously rebuilding the order – so nothing is actually gained or lost… the work is simply transformed – a functioning “monochromatic transformer”, as tousignant might see it

that’s the tension and balance i’m talking about – the look you were asking about likely has something to do with autointeraction, alinearity, and most likely by my attempt to render visible order/chaos and balance/tension in every work i do

your attempt in aleph null (it now seems to me) might be in the form of progressive linearity on an alinear path – and well done

ted

PS, “Look Again” is a rework of my earlier work, “Poem by Numbers 77” from march 2015 – warnell.com/mona/pbnum77.htm

which work is a progression of “Poem by Numbers 52” from april 2013 – warnell.com/mona/pbnum52.htm

which work was about learning canvas coding for circular motion

Poem by Numbers works usually (not always) are about coding research and development – moreso than concept development, which comes in later works like “Look Again”

other artists have “Untitled XX” works – i have “Poem by Numbers XX”

These were created on invitation to make a work related to self-portraiture for Scenes of Selves, Occasions for Ruses, a group exhibition at the Surrey Art Gallery. The curator saw an earlier dbCinema piece I did called The Club that incinemates the faces of my favorite North American politicians, business men, and psychopaths. He asked me to do related work with photos of myself rather than Jeffrey Dahmer, Paul Wolfowitz, Russell Williams, George Bush, and the rest of that psychotic, murderous crew. Which seemed like a remarkably strong opportunity to at least make an idiot of myself.

Let me show you the ‘trailers’ to the two resulting videos. What I’d like to show you are slideshows made of screenshots from the two videos. The videos are made of dbCinemations/collages of 53 images of me from the day I was born to my current grizzled state at 53 years of age.  The Surrey show will run from September 15 (the opening is from 7:30-9:30pm), 2012 till December 16, 2012. The show was curated by Jordan Strom.

The first trailer is at http://vispo.com/dbcinema/selfportrait2/ index.htm?n=1 . The video of which these screenshots are composed used two dbCinema brushes. One of the brushes ‘paints’ a letter from my name each frame. The other brush paints a circle each frame. Each of the brushes (usually) paints a different photo. So we see two simultaneous photos of me being drawn. The man and the baby. Etc. A brush paints a given photo for several seconds and then paints a different photo. The slideshow is composed of 47 still images.

The second trailer is at http://vispo.com/dbcinema/selfportrait3/ index.htm?n=1 . The video used one dbCinema brush: a Flash brush. In other words, the brush was a SWF turned into a mask. The shape of the brush was a curving, undulating, rotating, translated line. Each frame of the video, dbCinema rendered one brush stroke, one rendering of the brush image; the curving line’s paint was sampled from photos of me. The brush would sample from a photo for several seconds before moving on to another photo. What we’re looking at here is not the video but 17 screenshots from the video.

In the main, the man does not cohere. No coherent person emerges from this process of forcibly joining / collaging / synthesizing / remixing these 53 photos of me. It doesn’t magically tell me who I have always been. Or does it? Or if not, what does it suggest? You could say “If you don’t know who you’ve always been, no piece of art is going to clue you in.” Well I do kinda know. On the other hand, I do seem to tell myself a lot of stories.

It seems what the self-portrait does for me mainly is to problematize the notion of the existence of a person whom I have always been. The images in the video are messy. Like birth mess. Perhaps that’s part of our discomfort in life. We’re always in the midst of our own birth mess. And death stink. As Bob Dylan once observed, “He not busy being born is busy dying.”

I put together a twenty minute video talking about a fantastic piece of digital poetry by Joe Keenan from the late nineties called MOMENT. Check it out: http://vispo.com/keenan/4. MOMENT, written in JavaScript for browsers, is a work of visual interactive code poetry. It’s one of the great unacknowledged works for the net.

I used Camtasia 8 to create this video. I’ve used the voice-over capabilities of Camtasia before to create videos that talk about what’s on the screen, but this is the first time I’ve been able to use the webcam with it. Still a few bugs, though, it seems: at times the video is quite asynchronous between voice and video.

Still, you get the idea. I’m a big fan of Joe Keenan’s MOMENT and am glad I finally did a video on it.

Just a brief note to say something about color music. Cuz I’ve spoken of Aleph Null, a project of mine, as one of color music.

My friend Jeremy Turner in Vancouver recently pointed out the work of Thomas Wilfred (1889-1968) to me. It wasn’t a surprise to me that somebody was doing color music back in 1917–because that sort of thing was going on, what with Theosophy and the work of people such as Kandinsky. “Synesthesia was [a] topic of intensive scientific investigation in the late 19th century and early 20th century” (Wikipedia). The idea of ‘color music’ is not a new one, certainly.

But I bring up Thomas Wilfred’s work because his understanding of ‘color music’ is especially interesting. His work was visual. It wasn’t organically linked to audio. So why did he call it color music, then, if it didn’t involve music or sound? Well, because the machines he created were like musical instruments. One played them like one played musical instruments. Musical instruments, when played, create patterned sound and we enjoy the patterned sounds of music. Wilfred’s machines, when played, produced patterned, colored light shows that were meant to be enjoyed in the same sort of way that music is enjoyed. Music is quite abstract, when there are no lyrics. It is just sound without any obvious ‘meaning’. Wilfred’s machines produced patterned light waves and color without any obvious meaning.

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Aleph Null makes color music. Colors are tones. Musical notes are tones. Music is tones moving in time. Aleph Null makes changing color tones move in time. There is no audio.

Aleph Null is an instrument of color music. This is about how to play it. It’ll play on it’s own. But it profits immensely from a human player interceding continually. It’s interactive online art.

Color music in Aleph Null has a simple structure. There is a central color. It’s the main color. All the other colors are within a certain distance from the central color. That distance is called the color range.

Here’s how to change the central color.

1. Click the Aleph Null logo at top left or press the ‘1’ key to make the controls visible.
2. Press the ‘2’ key or click the input box labelled ‘central color’ to make the central color color-picker visible.
3. Click around in both parts of the color-picker to see how it works. The current central color is displayed in the central color input box.

The colors Aleph Null uses are all random distances from the central color and these distances do not exceed the color range value. The lower the color range value, the closer all the colors are to the central color. The higher the color range value, the greater the range of colors that Aleph Null will use. If the color range is set to 0, Aleph Null only uses one color: the central color. If the color range is 255, any color might be used.

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I’ve just completed my first JavaScript work using the new HTML 5 canvas tag. It’s called Aleph Null. It’s a generative, interactive work of visual art. It launches on turbulence.org from NYC.

Aleph Null is best viewed by the light of a full moon. Or near full moon. Same with the set of stills I made. I mean they do like a bit of darkness.

If you’re using a PC, I’d recommend Chrome to view Aleph Null. At least on my machine, Chrome provides the smoothest performance. Firefox provides a similarly high framerate, but is a bit jerky from time to time. Internet Explorer kind of sucks. On the Mac, Chrome, Firefox, and Safari seem to be fine.

A dbCinema maundering on the Vancouver riot: http://vispo.com/dbcinema/vanriot

The Club is a moving-image digital collaging of 57 images of selected North American politicians, business men, and psychopaths from the eighties till the present. There’s also a linked slideshow of some stills from the video.

The politicians are conservatives who have blasted away both at home and abroad. Via deregulation, the shock doctrine, and explicitly military means. The business men are CEO’s who are mostly now behind bars, or have been. The psychopaths include (Ex-Colonel) Russell Williams who, until the time of his arrest for two sex murders, headed CFB Trenton, the largest military air-base in Canada.

So it’s a bit of a Dorian Gray piece. But they are each others’ deformities.

Here’s what Andy Warhole said about The Club: “they look like some kind of Auschwitz-Chernobyl mutant legacy, and maybe they are — this is like morphing, blocpix, mr. potatohead, and various slice-n-dice technologies… but not them — this is new — and of course i love your politics 🙂 ”

Much of the work I’ve done with dbCinema, the graphic synthesizer I wrote in Adobe Director, has been toward beauty. This is quite different. But The Club was still made with dbCinema. There’s other work I’ve done with dbCinema here.

I’ve been working on version 3 of a JavaScript slideshow program I call Slidvid. I initially developed it to show screenshots of dbCinema in action. All the dbCinema slideshows use an earlier version of the Slidvid software. I’d like to show you Slidvid 3.0 in this post. And if you have a site you’d like to show your graphics on in a slideshow, drop me a line and we’ll put Slidvid on your site with your graphics.

The graphics in the first Slidvid 3 slideshow are old ones; they’re screenshots from a generative, interactive Shockwave piece I wrote called  A Pen.  I’ve had the screenshots on my site for quite a while, but not in a slideshow. The experience of them in a slideshow is more to my liking. Less work for the viewer. More options for the viewer and the presenter. And just a classier presentation.

The graphics in this slideshow were made with a virtual pen that has four nibs. The ‘ink’ of each nib is a lettristic animation that leaves trails as the pen moves the nibs/animations around the screen. Think of the nibs as being attached to the pen by long loose springs. When you click and drag the mouse in the Shockwave piece (not the slideshow), the nibs eventually catch up with you. And you can adjust things like the size and opacity of each nib. Hence the sort of graphics you see in this post. The project A Pen consists of both the interactive Shockwave piece and also the slideshow of screenshots taken from the Shockwave piece in action.

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I find Andre Michelle’s (Flash)  interactive audio piece called Pulsate quite interesting. I won’t describe it (very much) because it’s online and you can check it out for yourself. Writing about works you can check out online is different from writing about works you can’t check out so easily yourself. Overly descriptive writing about such pieces avoids the harder and more interesting task of saying something about the piece that isn’t obvious.

This paragraph contains  all the description that’s required. Click to create a circle. Press the space bar to start from scratch. A circle  grows in size until it kisses another expanding circle; a note is played; then the two circles both begin to shrink in size. They shrink until they disappear; then they grow again.

Pulsate is a generative work. That is, the audio is generated by the program depending on what you, the user/player, do. And it’s quite interestingly compositional, really. The compositional paradigm is dynamically visual and geometric. Very simple. But intriguingly puddle cosmic and charming. Looking at puddles in the rain is a kind of quotidian cosmic contemplation. Expanding circles intersecting. Ripples of what is and what seems and distortions of the image accordingly. Pulsate nods in the direction of rainy puddle lovers and geometers.

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