the process
The animation below plays back the process of creation, analysis, and transformation (destruction) that produces the end results you see below the video – the images, paintings, and prints.
First, red, green, and blue spheres were manually gathered together into a dense cluster. The spheres coming together at the start is not how I formed the structure but just an experiment (that I am quite fond of). After rotating the cluster a full turn to see all sides of it, each of the different coloured spheres appear in the order that they were created. The structure is made visible one colour at a time. After that, the cluster is exploded/shattered and where the spheres finally land serves as the final artwork out of which paintings and prints are made. One of the explosions is without constraint and the other takes place within an invisible cube.
This is an early and fairly simple example of a structure produced by a manually articulated formula – an ’embodied’ generative work, that is then subjected to a process of analysis and then transformation in order to explore and deconstruct the creative content contained within the original structure. When I say ’embodied’, as I do in most of the descriptions for my other projects, I mean that the structure was created by hand according to a formula that I understood in my mind as opposed to one defined by computer code (that comes later). This is still an early manifestation of these ambitions – generation, analysis, transformation – but they are there nonetheless. Future work will be elaborating on this approach as I develop new processes of generation, analysis, and transformation mirrored and inspired by processes present and functioning in the human psyche.
The key to this piece is the original formula that defines the starting cluster. In later works in this series I will be exploring different structures, the patterns that they produce when they are shattered/exploded and what about psyche can be read in these results. Different formulas for the initial structure will produce different shattering patterns as will the dynamics of how each structure was generated. In other words, I can create different structures using the same formula because there is room for the arbitrary. Different formulas will also, of course, produce different structures as well so the structures are different on two levels – between structures generated using the same formula and between structures using different formulas.
final image 1 – explosion without constraints
final image 2 – explosion with cube constraint
audio album – ‘two fields’
Audio used in the video above is from this album. Click the cover image to go to the Bandcamp page.
