exploding spheres

Artwork progress update announcement

The Game of Chess + Hadleigh Castle

I recently finished this painting. This is India Ink on 22.5″ x 15″ watercolour paper. Two ‘old masters’ paintings on top of each other – inspired by printmaking. Click on the image above to go to the shop.

The two source paintings:

‘The Game of Chess’ – c.1555, by Sofonisba Anguissola

and

‘Hadleigh Castle, The Mouth of the Thames – Morning After a Stormy Night’ – c.1829 by John Constable

Why did I make a painting like this? I love the idea of arbitrarily piling images on top of each other, as if I was shuffling through a number of acetate images and this is where they haphazardly landed when I set them down. Its a kind of anti-composition. They are placed as they are simply because they are centred in the frame, not because of any compositional requirement. Or I could say that the compositional requirement is that there is no compositional requirement. I plan on making more paintings like this based on old masters paintings and other unrelated source material – piles of images. I used this process to create the covers for things music 1 and things music 2 (click images to go to albums).

This is a media project I recently finished. This is first in a series of works using ‘exploding spheres’. It consists of audio, 3D computer animation, prints, and paintings. It is like a miniature version of the High Park Branches project in that it is a single project that occupies many different media and it uses a computational process to generate ‘results’ in an animation which are used to produce final artworks.

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The animation traces the creative process. It starts with the genesis – the spheres ‘englobulating’ into a final clumpage. I then animate the order that the spheres were created in for each colour separately; red, green, and blue. After that, you see why this is called ‘exploding spheres’. Physics are applied to the spheres and they burst forth accordingly. Wherever they land, that is the final image, and that is what you see at the end of the sequence. The initial configuration of spheres has a bearing on where they land and this is where I suggest there is room for interpretation of the results. As I produce more work in this series, I will be exploring this idea further. I also performed the explosion within an invisible box to produce another slightly different result. Both of the final images are available as the prints and paintings that you see below. Click the images to go the shop.

01

final image

painting

02

final image

painting

audio

The audio in the above video can be found on this album (click image):

These two audio works were created alongside the animation though unlike in High Park Branches, the audio was not generated through interaction with software or the animation. Instead, I simply drew the notes by hand in a multitrack audio editor (Ableton Live). These, like so much of my work, are pure noise fields. The intensity is constant throughout yet no two moments are alike. Each of them only consist of two tracks.

extra trees

Here are some more animations from the 2D tree series. This is a continuation from the last post. These are the latest experiments with cellular automata in a tree structure. I will be returning to this again in the future – I want to see what else is possible using 2D trees with cellular automata as the system driving the animation. I am particularly interested in creating some flows through the branches. In these videos you can see that I am approaching that realization. The soundtrack continues with incredible naturescape (recorded in South River last spring). The audio for the second animation below consists of a track made up of multiple recordings layered on top of each other – a ‘saturation mix’.