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).
exploding spheres
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
print
painting
02
final image
print
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’.
Each project that I embark on tends to lead to new realizations and ideas that I would not have discovered otherwise. Only by having done the work am I lead to these new paths – it is impossible to imagine them beforehand – it doesn’t work that way. This is what I call following the creative impulse – working on projects in a way that allows them to unfold according to their own needs and inclinations that spontaneously arise during their execution. They tend to develop a life of their own and I end up just being thier servant. I am sure you have heard others speak of this as well. I have found that when I am able to make the room for this to happen in my life – and it doesn’t necessarily mean giving everything else up – I do have an unrelated part-time job that I have to take in order to pay the bills, but I still am able to have enough time in my life so that when I do engage with my artwork I have the mental/creative space to able to allow it to flourish unimpeded. So if new directions are discovered in the process, as they almost invariably are, I am able to pursue them as well. Again, this what I call following the creative impulse.
When I am able to follow this impulse adequately, I begin to live the creative life – a life that is contained within a creative world that starts to affect, develop, and enclose everything. One of the notable aspects of this phenomenon is the unlocking of certain domains within the dream realms (ie. dreams while sleeping) and this has happened to me before, for example during school, when I was making artwork all the time. Certain dream realms that are otherwise impossible to access are made available.
Last night I had a dream about an infinite landscape characterized by rivers, deserts, mountains, hills, valleys, and other various terrain. There were absolutely no living creatures, no plants nor animals. The colours were unlike anything I have ever seen during my waking hours and I understood that as I travelled deeper into this realm, the colours and forms would only become richer and deeper, as they were defined by an evolving language of their own. It was very vivid.
These are the kind of dreams and domains that I can only access when I am thoroughly engaged with my art. Though I have yet to acquire any significant outward recognition, I know that by the inspiration and understanding that I acquire from my own work and through evidence of the by-products such as the dream mentioned above, that I am in a good place. No matter what kind of reception; good, bad, or indifferent, the work itself serves as its own reward. I am working all the time, as I have been for over thirty years now, and this is all only going in one direction.
This is a single layer in one colour (with some slight variations in colour in spots) drawn from a photo taken by me in High Park sometime in spring of 2022.
some details
While trees and forests have definitely figured prominently in my work, I never imagined that they would occupy this much of my attention – but I am comfortable with that. Below I describe some different tree/forest based projects.
2D trees
In 2022 I began a 2D tree project. The formula is simple: draw a tree structure with the originating trunk starting at the bottom middle of the picture plane. No two colours may be adjacent and no branch may touch another branch. All space must be filled up by making sure that every branch extends as close to its neighbours as possible (within one square distance minimum). No small, one square branches may be made in the middle of a branch, only the end (otherwise you end up with a lot of small random ‘buds’ which I omitted for aesthetic reasons). I used the standard seven colours: red, green, blue, cyan, magenta, yellow, and white and each of the colours has a corresponding tone. I wrote some software that records the drawing process and then plays it back and that is what you see in the two videos below. There are more videos which I will be sharing in future posts. Please like and subscribe and share and all that.
As I have mentioned before, and will reiterate in future commentary, what I like to do in much of my work is create artwork and then analyze it – with the analysis also serving as a form of artwork as well. I develop formulas (generative artwork), much like what I have described above, to produce finished pieces. These formulas are designed to reveal a particular aspect of psyche – so what I am exploring in this project is what aspect of psyche the tree structure reveals. In the second phase of a project, I apply processes of analysis to the piece to deconstruct it and further reveal different aspects of the creative content. What you see above is the first and most rudimentary form of analysis that I apply, the replaying of the creation of the piece. See EHB2 and Ukraine for a couple of recent examples of this but you will find it throughout my work – it is the starting point of the analysis – the ‘introduction’.
Moving on from there, I explore different computational systems that ‘play’ the artwork as an instrument. Again, EHB2 serves as an excellent example of this, as well as my most recently completed project, High Park Branches. In EHB2 I employed a complex system to drive the dots around the 3D triangle mesh, creating animations, some of them with sound (scroll to the bottom of the linked page to activate the online app). These results are meant to be understood as the ‘playing’ of the artwork as an instrument. The player is you, the person activating the system, and the ‘score’ is the system that I have designed to operate within the structure. Each different artwork/object will produce a slightly different ‘signature’ dynamic and sound – thereby offering a way of characterizing the creative content of the work. So it a double artwork – the original piece, the object, and the way that it is played. This could be compared to a sound sculpture – the sculpture is an artwork on its own but it also produces (audio) artwork when you play it.
In the High Park Branches project I employed a system based on self-organized criticality. I am very much interested in non-linear dynamical systems and I am using each of these artworks as an opportunity to explore them and perhaps even invent some of my own. I am just getting started and have a lot to learn still but I have definitely started now that the foundation has been built – this has been an ambition I have had for decades. For the 2D trees that you see above, I am currently working on a system based on cellular automata to animate the artwork. I will be sharing progress on this soon. With any luck I will have something put together by the end of next week.
The internal data structure is, of course, a tree which you will find everywhere throughout computer science – for example, any conventional filing system is based on the hierarchical tree structure. The form that I am using is known as a ‘generic tree’ which means that each node (the place where branches separate from a trunk or another branch) can have any number of branches. The binary tree is especially significant in computer science as it offers significant advantages in searching and sorting. This is a tree where each node has two and only two branches. I plan to explore this in more depth in the future as well.
This is another consistent aspect to my work. For each project, I take intermittent screenshots of animations and 2D/3D models to produce paintings and prints from. The paintings are always acrylic on unstretched canvas approximately 64″ x 51″ and the prints are $35, 12″ x 18″ inkjet on high quality matte paper printed by one of the best print shops that I have ever found – Red Hot Printing near Dupont and Landsdowne in Toronto, Canada.
I have just started, as of this week, on a 3D tree project. Below are a couple of early images. I have already produced one video that animates the creation of the tree (much as I have described above) and I am working on the same kind of system that I am developing for the 2D trees, cellular automata, to apply to these 3D trees. I am very excited about this project as I am using Blender, a 3D modelling and animation program that produces superb results. Blender also features a Python scripting interface which I am using to produce these animations. Finally I have a chance to learn Python and use it to produce animation in Blender – incredible possibilities here. I am also working on online interactive versions of the 2D and 3D tree projects which will run on my website (using Javascript, three.js, and tone.js), so you will be able to both generate and ‘play’ 2D and 3D trees of your own and then order prints and paintings of the results – that is the plan. You can see in the EHB2 project what this will look like.
but wait, that’s not all
High Park Branches
I would be remiss if I failed to mention the recently completed High Park Branches Project (HPB). As I mentioned in my previous blog detailing the wrap-up of my recent show what presented at Back Lane Studios during April of this year, the HPB project has been completely documented on my website and consists of a large number of images, videos/animations, commentary, prints, paintings, and audio albums. This, like many of my projects, embodies many different kinds of media and employs computer programming and animation at the core of it.
Here is a link to the final album of nine that serves as a culmination/compilation of all the audio albums before it:
but wait, that’s not all
NVHT
To illustrate that this focus on trees/forests is not something new in my practice, here is a link to an older project from 2013-2014: NVHT – New Vistas of Hyper-Dimensional Travel. It was an installation that I constructed out of white yarn and black lights in an approximately half-acre section of forest at Midlothian Castle in Burk’s Falls Ontario. I will be discussing this project in more detail in future blog posts. If you care to learn more now, here are the project pages on my website. It’s a pretty significant project in my oeuvre.
it was a dark and stormy night – Ghosts of Harvest Past
click image to go to online store
dream
I was in an unfamiliar mall and was leading a group of my family and extended family members somewhere (not sure where). I was scouting ahead. I went up a set of stairs to a door that lead to the next ‘part’ of the mall. I opened the door which lead to the outdoors. There was a large bridge to the right which had predominant black and red colour. There was also a shoreline, beach, and some touristy type of businesses – restaurants, bars, sidewalk vendors and the like. I closed the door, went down the stairs and met with my family to lead them to the next part. We went up the stairs to the door and when I opened it – it was a completely different place. This time, it was a downtown city much like it is in Hamilton – office buildings, cars and roads, people, skyscrapers.
Well I am finally getting back on my feet again after having wrapped up my show at Back Lane Studios nearly a month ago.
I am so grateful to have had a chance to work with all of these people: Ellen who runs Back Lane Studios, Abby and Rene for their interest, support, and very thoughtful and helpful feedback, Doris Purchase for breaking the curse – after thirty plus years, finally someone bought one of my paintings, Doris also helped me set up the show, Darren Copeland for taking time to visit and for some excellent constructive criticism, Gunar Roze for the same, Pauline Gill (my mom) and my Aunt Lorraine for a couple of visits and moral and financial support, and of course thank you to all who attended the opening, closing, and any time in-between. I met so many very interesting people and I experienced a variety of kinds of feedback – *all* of it good.
I won’t describe the whole show in this one blog post. I will continue to elaborate in future blobs.
thank you Doris Purchase! – an artist herself (I have one of her ‘bugs’)
Abby and Rene
Pauline Gill and Ellen Moorehouse
A special thank you goes to Julie Lassonde – movement/performance artist and collaborator with me in the piece we presented during the closing day. She is a brilliant artist and lawyer and I am so lucky to have had a chance to work with her.
Julie Lassonde performing her work, On our terms, at the 7a*11d Festival 2022
photo credit: Henry Chan Jr.
You will find the results of the show on my website: on the project page for High Park Branches, and on the gallery show page. Here is a link to the nine audio albums that I produced from using my installation (totalling eleven hours of new material). It is a dream come true to be able to produce finished work this way – from interactive software that I have written in C++ with accompanying 3D computer generated visuals. For anyone who has not seen it yet, here are some videos demonstrating the installation in action:
These are all (except the first one) one hour pieces formed by loading a set of samples into the installation, making some adjustments in the software, starting it, and letting it run for an hour as it articulated on its own. This is generative art – something I have been trying to do in a substantial way for quite a while.
I think the next move with the software is to have evolving/transforming systems. This installation produces random behaviour triggered by the collisions of branches, but that is it – there is no evolving/transforming system here, just endless tumbling branches in the wind (which I am quite fond of and is the point of this particular project). If you go to the EHB video or web page (you have to scroll to the bottom of the page to find the app) you will see a complex system (though a rudimentary one) operating there. That is where this software is most likely headed next. There are plenty of very interesting options (which I will learn by implementing in projects); Markov Chains, cybernetics, chaos theory, cellular automata, and so many other possibilities. I am definitely at the tip of that iceberg.
Here are a couple more videos going over the show. The first was recorded just before the opening and the second is made up of photos taken near the end of the show.
Prints are here (they are all $35) and here are my paintings. You will find all of them in my online store which looks good and works well, ie. safe transactions via Shopify (which is excellent and recommended btw) and if you live in Toronto, delivery is often next day (by me).
I am very happy that I had a chance to put this show together in the way that I did. I took care of just about everything myself and had complete creative control over every aspect so the show turned out just as I would have liked, just as I had envisioned. It is very satisfying to have produced all of that entirely on my own terms, without compromise – in no way does it leave me wanting or feeling unresolved. If you are embarking on a creative endeavour, know that doing things entirely your own way is possible and is every bit as satisfying as you would expect – it is not a myth.
I have found it incredibly difficult getting to this blog but now I see why – because I am in a different place now – the dialogue has begun. One of the things that I am realizing is that this blog will serve well as an art channel in my practice. I am starting to learn how this is possible. The different media/social media platforms start to work as a network that you can use in that way – by links.
I am using this blog along with You Tube (among other platforms – see links below). On You Tube I can post my latest 3D computer animations (mostly Blender but some three.js too) with some of my favourite parts of the audio art I produce serving as the soundtrack (and I use the term ‘audio art’ deliberately). Many of my animations on my channel are like that, such as this one. I understand that my music is difficult and uncomfortable – that is what I am going for. I love chaotic sounds/compositions and dissonance. I have found some of Bekah Simms music to be very satisfying, along with Gyorgy Ligeti (of course!), but that’s something for another post.
Video is usually the best way to document artwork as well – especially interactive and performance. It also serves as an art form in itself. As just mentioned, I am particularly interested in computer animation. I am always keen to learn more about computer graphics, especially 3D – it is a very deep and rich scientific field that is also very much an art form – a true blend of art and science. That is exactly what I am aspiring to – art that is audio and 3D computer graphics but that also serves a scientific purpose. Like the 3D computer generated animations that demonstrate scientific principles or display data (data visualization) but it being art instead – thie certainly not something I invented. In the case of my art, I am using art to study psyche. I treat each artwork embodying a particular aspect of psyche – each system that I develop has a point, a theme, a focus, a certain perspective – even if there may not be a name for it. This is an aspect of my art that requires elaboration – I still have a long way to go and a lot to learn – particularly in regards to the math and the psychology – but I have at least developed the framework within which to pursue this -OpenFrameworks, Blender, Supercollider for standalone work, and three.js, and tone.js for online pieces. Artwork that has a function – I like to think of them as being like Qigoing exersizes. I will elaborate on this in a future post.
the incredible extra story of delight and whimsicality
As mentioned earlier, it took me three weeks plus to recover from that show. I put everything I had into it and pushed myself too hard – at one point I ended up in the hospital due to uncontrollable back spasms – that’s never happened before. Stress. The lower back issues started on the Friday just before the last weekend. At one point I was in the lane (the ‘back lane’) behind the studio trying to bring one of the sandwich boards in and my back was really acting up and I could barely walk. A woman passing by gave me a hand and with a grave look of concern on her face, told me about her daughter who has similar problems. She recommended ‘Robaxacet’. I was in so much pain at that point that it was embarrassing. I tried laughing it off but it came out sounding a bit crazy. Oh I can laugh now though. I am not sure if I will ever see her again, she was very kind. So yeah, that was fun. This might be a bit TMI but it does make an exciting story and it ends well – I got my back back.
High Park Branches – final images 2 and 3 – paintings
The two mid-scale paintings of the ‘results’ from interacting with the installation serving as the center piece of the show. I am planning on painting many more like this.
opening of ‘what’ on Friday April 12, at Back Lane Studios
Many thanks to all who attended and to Ellen Moorhouse who has allowed me to use Back Lane Studios to stage this show.
I think the opening was a real success. There was at one point I think about 20-25 people and many friends including a friend from way back in high school (c. 1990). I presented my slide show which I was really nervous about – but it went fine once I got started. People requested the spinning branch videos. I played a few from my ‘High Park Branches’ You Tube playlist which gives a good sense of the different kinds of sounds and audio compositions generated for this project.
I also played the installation recording videos:
The second video is the second set of audio sounds that I can load into the installation and it forms a different composition, ‘continuous tones’. It was inspired by what you hear in the spinning branch video at the top of this blog post. The audio for that one is like a sketch – it is a multitrack recording that I played by hand on a keyboard, whereas what you hear in the second installation video, though it sounds a lot like the sketch, is completely generated by the interactive software. I had to make a lot of adjustments in the software to make it sound right. The tones are triggered by branches colliding, just like with the other piece, ‘branch strikes’, but I had to, for example, extend the time between collision triggered tones to make it sound right.
In the first installation video, ‘branch strikes’, the sounds used are samples made from recordings of hitting branches against each other in High Park. The tones in the second video however, are made using real-time synthesis in Supercollier – something that that software is particularly well designed for. I looking forward to exploring more of this.
pre-opening walk-through
Here’s a quick video touring the set up show about an hour and a half before opening. This is certainly not the first time I have set up one of my own shows so I am getting better at making sure that all the work done on time. There was an incredible amount of work that went into this one and I am so glad to be on the other side. This is my first show in Toronto and I wasn’t sure what to expect but there were a lot of friendly faces there and it was all very pleasant and enjoyable and golly, I even sold a couple of prints.
One woman at the show remarked on how my work spans many different media. The large wall in particular shows a bit of this – the 3D models on the left, the resulting prints on the right, and some large scale paintings of results in the center. Along with that is the interactive installation, audio albums, and videos/animations, which are all integral to the process. It is a bit of research project.
This show is about selling work too – something that has taken me a long time to embrace. I have paintings in every price range: $5000, $500, and $35 for the any of the prints – and I have tons of them. Buying a print is a great way to support what I do and you get a cool thing in return. I have to say that I am very fond of these prints. They might not make me a lot of money but I make them really because I think they look good. I also make paintings out of the some of the images that I use for prints. All the images are screenshots of running software (online or standalone) or from computer animations (Blender). This is part of what I do to support the development of these artwork/software projects like ‘High Park Branches’. I found a good local printer, Red Hot Printing near Landsdowne and Dupont. The ink and paper quality are excellent – the colours are sharp and vivid. It wasn’t easy finding a good printer or a printer that I could work with. Print houses, of course, cater to large scale printing jobs for commercial enterprises, not independent artists printing small runs so they often are not very receptive.
Here are three examples:
(click on images to go to the things)
Here are some pictures from the event via Abby Bushby:
Abby and Rene – the two people who own and live in the house I live in the basement apartment of. I have been there for seven years now and they essentially have let me run my art practice out of the apartment. I have completed some of the most important work I have ever done there including learning several computer languages, completing many art projects which include all the media discussed above, and of course, setting up and preparing for this show.
Massive thank you to Doris Purchase for helping with the set up. She is a professional artist living in the area and often shows out of Propeller Gallery in the Queen West area. As someone who knows what they are doing (she also works at the AGO), she offered plenty of valuable advice and insight – super duper helpful.
Some more shots from the opening – photos by Pauline Gill.
Suzanne Farkas
This the watercolour painting I made for Abby and Rene in 2019 drawn from a photo I took of their back yard. I gave it to them as a way to say thank you for the amazing opportunity to live and work out of the basement apartment in their house. Honestly, even being in their presence is a gift – they are brilliant, kind, and creative people and I am so lucky to be living there.
The two large ‘results’ paintings – the way branches are left after a session with the interactive installation.
These are prints of sixteen of the 3D modelled branches (the final, seventeenth, is on the right end of the wall).
I am working on a couple more videos that will show the interactive installation in action and a slideshow of all the prints, paintings, and descriptions. This will be in my next blog.
Well the thing happened with other things and a whole bunch of other stuff as well. There were things other things and whole nother more bunch special extra more new nother bunch special other nother whole new nother more extra nother of extra nother of extra nother of nother of nother of whole extra more whole nother more whole of extra of whole of extra of extra of extra of extra of whole of extra of more.
snorpages or whatever
Okay anyways I am just getting way off topic here or whatever. Stuff? Oh there was stuff alright – that’s for stuff or I mean that’s for sure. There was stuff and other stuff as well as a whole extra more new nother bunch special nother more other stuff or whatever. Bunch extra tymez stylez was involved somehow I am pretty sure. Anyways, there was a bunch of stuff and a whole nother stuff and a whole new nother more bunch stuff and whole new extra more bunch special nother stuff and and a whole new extra more bunch special other nother stuff involved or whatever.
There was a whole bunch of extra other stuff involved as well. Or no wait no there wasn’t or I mean wait yes there was or I mean whatever. There was stuff as well. Thanks for all the stuff and other things as well. Anyways that’s great, have a nice day and things as well as other things. That’s great or ok thanks.
As we draw nearer to the opening of what, the self-curated art show that I am staging at Back Lane Studios, I am producing and releasing a lot of material for the feature project, High Park Branches.
The show opens this coming Friday at 6pm. Part way through the evening, I will be giving a short talk to explain and demonstrate the interactive installation.
So over the past two weeks I have been getting an enormous amount of work done on the High Park Branches Project as I get ready to open. Last weekend I released three new albums (all from this project), and today I posted another video, and added eighteen new prints to my online shop.
Here’s today’s new video:
As you can hear, this is a different set of sounds. The first installation playback video that I posted, branch strikes was generated using samples – small audio files. This one, on the other hand, makes use of Supercollider’s real-time synthesis capabilities – which are considerable. From the website (https://supercollider.github.io/), Supercollider is, “A platform for audio synthesis and algorithmic composition, used by musicians, artists and researchers working with sound”. It is based on an older language called Smalltalk. It is free and open source, very powerful and very fast. It has a pretty steep learning curve if you want to do more than the most typical things with it so it has taken me a while to get the hang of it and I still have plenty to learn. I am just so impressed by how powerful Supercollider is and how amazing it sounds and I have been using it to handle audio for my interactive installations, and for other audio work, for about six years now.
In my artistic practice I afford equal attention to audio and visual – one is not dominant over the other. I tend to go back and forth between working on one or the other. Over the past couple of weeks I have been working with the audio aspect of this installation and what you hear in the video above is a good example of how I use my interactive installations to generate audio compositions. Here is the album I released last weekend that is made using ‘continuous tones’:
And here is the album generated from the ‘branch strike’ samples:
These are both hour long ‘white noise’ pieces. White noise is a form I use throughout my work. From Wikipedia, “..white noise is a random signal having equal intensity at different frequencies, giving it a constant power spectral density” – uniform intensity but patternless throughout. I have been creating white noise audio pieces for decades now and the hard part is making them sound interesting. Here’s the first album that I published on Bandcamp, Shape Changer’s Stairway, and it serves as a good model. Anyone can make roaring or hissing sounds, and unused television channels produce perfect white noise but who can listen to that for longer than a minute?
I am happy with the High Park Branches albums above (and the SCS too). I make them an hour long for many reasons. It is like the meditation music that you hear on You Tube – those 8hr, 12hr videos with music that is on a loop, except the pieces your hear above are not loops – they are continuously variable. Its the kind of thing that I can put on and leave on in the background while I am doing something else, such as cooking or practising Tai Chi. You can listen to as little or as much as you want and you will, generally, hear the same thing – it is uniform throughout in terms of its overall sound, though no two moments are alike – like a waterfall. In fact, I have an album that is nothing but a recording of a waterfall – high falls, as a model expression of white noise. I am working on some more sets of audio for the installation. Actually, I will probably be working on them into summer, long after the art show is over as there are many sets I want to try out. I will of course, be working on them throughout the show and posting them here as I finish them. My art shows have always been a work in progress.
I have always aspired to create true ‘audio art’ which is not that easy to do. It is difficult to not just end up making music. There is a difference between audio art and music – this a discussion for another blog. What you hear above is my version of audio art and I am confident that this is indeed and expression of that and not music.
new prints
This is something that I will cover in more depth next week, but I will quickly mention that I have added ten new prints of nine new branches and eight new prints of the final results. I have finished some paintings too but have not photographed them yet – I plan to have that ready soon as well.
branch #17
One of eight new prints made from snapshots of the final results from a session with the interactive software. Available in the online shop now – click the images to go there.
I am in the process of making paintings out of many of these images as well – both as acrylic on canvas and India ink on watercolour paper. Coming soon!
I have previously posted a number of videos on my You Tube channel featuring 3D models of branches that I have found laying on the ground in High Park (Toronto, Canada) over the past half year. What you see and hear in this video is a playback of interaction with the installation that I have developed within which these branches (and a few more that I have not made videos of) are actors.
This installation was developed for the show ‘what’ – a self-curated exhibition which I will be presenting at Back Lane Studios (in Toronto) during the month of April in 2024. You will find the Facebook event page here. The opening is on Friday, April 12th, starting at 6pm. I will be giving a short slideshow/talk to explain my work and in particular, the installation and how it operates. The set up includes a projection screen, two speakers on either side, a sensor (Kinect) below the screen, my laptop, and a small mixer. As participants draw closer to the installation, winds pick up in a virtual on-screen environment that cause the branches to fly around randomly, as you see in the video. The collisions of the branches trigger samples that serve to form spontaneously generated audio compositions.
What you hear in this video is just one collection of sounds – the most obvious choice and the starting point – the sounds of branches banging into each other. I am busy working on many other collections of sound material to load into the installation in order to produce different kinds of audio compositions. You can think of this as an audio-visual artwork generator driven by audience interaction. Future videos will feature these different compositions – coming soon! I am also putting together a number of albums (three so far) that will feature this audio work – also coming soon! The resulting visuals, where the branches end up after the interactions are through, are made into prints and paintings that you will find here. I am in the process right now of rendering stills such as the one you see below into acrylic paintings on canvas and India ink on watercolour paper as well as prints. Expect to see them in my blog posts over the next few weeks.
more prints and paintings coming soon
The installation software was written by me in C++ using OpenFrameworks, the models were created in Blender, and the audio is generated using Supercollider. This is the next iteration of the same software used for last year’s work, Custom Catastrophe, presented as part of Nuit Blanche North in Huntsville, Ontario.
diagnostic screen
At the end of the video and featured below, you can see the second screen that only I can see during events and shows. This contains all of the diagnostic information drawn from the sensor in action. The central image is a depth-of-field point cloud captured by the Kinect – this sensor is designed to read depths. The upper right red rectangle with black pixels in it is an abstracted (and very simplified) view of the point cloud data and the teal rectangle below that is the core of the processing in this work. It is the engine that drives all of the motion that you see. It represents the input of the depth data into a system driven by self-organizing criticality. This is a non-linear process that exhibits emergent behaviour characterized broadly by a rice pile (note – not a sand pile) – the gradual piling of rice from a central source that creates tiny unpredictably evolving avalanches as the pile grows. Mirroring this process, in the software, activity accumulates in each cell of the grid and when it reaches a threshold value, it ‘spills’ over into neighbouring cells. During each frame of the animation each black pixel represents a spill in action and triggers forces to act on any of the branches in the environment.
various things or whatever
Exploring non-linear dynamic systems in my artwork has long been an ambition so it is very satisfying to now start to see this realized. I am just getting started with this aspect and still have much to learn. Expect to see much more in this direction in the future. Ultimately I am looking for insights into psyche, living presence, consciousness, through the exploration of emergent phenomena in computational artwork – such as what you see here.
I am very much into my You Tube channel. I post once a week, every Friday. I kind of like posting on Friday because, for the most part, people are getting off work for the weekend so why not some 3D computer graphics with tense sounding music?
Anyways, what I plan on doing now every week is, a) post a video on You Tube, b) create a blog post (such as this one) to use as a means to share the video, and c) then share on Facebook and possibly Instagram and anywhere else, such as email. The writing in You Tube for my video can serve multiple purposes and the animations/videos are often from various core projects that I am working on, so they certainly offer an accurate survey of my work.
Ok here’s the animation video, it’s right here:
cubes: this project is about cubes
I have been working this project off and on for eleven years now. This is another example of a spontaneously formed structure that can expand indefinitely in all directions. It is based on a dream I had: vague rooms formed by multi-coloured cubes. This is the ‘six-colour building‘ algorithm.
The initial 3D model is constructed in Blender and then imported to three.js where it resides on my website as an app. You can move it around, zoom, pan, etc.. Also, if you press the ‘p’ key, playback of the construction of the structure – the order that the cubes were created in – will start. And this is what you see in this video – a full playback.
As of March 15, 2024, this is the current state of the model. I will continue adding to it indefinitely until Blender and/or my website is unable to handle the size of the model. I am at 1370 cubes right now and the software is running fine – not significantly slower so there is plenty of room for more.
the formula or whatever
The arrangement of the cubes is based on a simple ’embodied’ algorithm. I say embodied because the algorithm is not defined by code but is implemented physically by me when I add cubes manually using the mouse (in Blender). The rules are simple: create vague rooms, no two adjacent cubes may be the same colour, and try to distribute the colours evenly throughout but without any pattern. Like almost all of my work, this is an expression of noise – the noise of consciousness, creative activity, psyche, living presence.
I have many prints and some large scale (3 x 1.5 meters) paintings which you will find here:
This project is far from over. While you can examine the model online and play back the creation, that is the most immediate and basic form of analysis – moving around the model and looking at it from different angles. There is much more to explore and you can see where I am headed in the EHB project.
In the EHB project, I am using a rudimentary complex system to determine where the dots travel in the triangle mesh. This is a way of ‘playing’ the object like an instrument. The instrument is the triangle mesh, the player is the person visiting the website, and the score is the system that is used to travel through the mesh (or graph).
I will be exploring various processes like this which I will be applying to whatever structure has been created – triangle mesh, cube, heightfield, pixels – all of the elemental computer graphics and animation forms. These processes are designed to reveal different aspects of the creative content encoded in the structures that I apply them to. So there are two steps in the process; 1 – the generation of the structure, which is constructed according to different ‘hand-made’ algorithms, and 2) the application of processes to those structures to reveal different aspects of the creative content contained within them.
The audio in the video is a composition that you will find on an upcoming album. It is a noise field. It was actually played by hand using the same form that I use in most other places – the ‘roughly even scattering’ and that is it. I am planning to make a much longer version.
These are fully rendered versions of the project ‘lines – r+b continuous, unbranched’. I am constructing, online, an open-ended structure that I can continue to add to indefinitely. It consists of only two lines, one red, one blue, that expand outwardly from a central location and wind around each other arbitrarily. I have been adding to this one for about a month (as of March 15, 2024). You can see the latest progress on my website here:
There is an app running on this page that displays the 3D structure. You can use your mouse to move it around, pan, zoom, etc.. If you press ‘p’ on your keyboard, a playback of the construction process, the order that the cubes were added, begins. Note that both lines are made by just lining up cubes in a row. I am going to continue adding to this structure indefinitely – until my computer runs out of memory/processing power. I am up to 2418 cubes so far which sounds like a lot but there is actually plenty of room to expand. I need to make the structure as computationally lean as possible – cubes are the most basic and fastest 3D objects that you can use.
The structure is initially created in Blender (3D modelling program) where I just place cubes manually in 3D space. The two images at the top of this post are renders from Blender and there is a lot that can be done in Blender! Animations coming soon (just finished some today). I then export them out of Blender and import them into a three.js Javascript app that I can run in the browser and on my website, as you can see from the link above and the third image in this post.
I am extremely happy to see these apps up and running on my website. This is something I have always been driving towards – online artwork using 3D graphics and sound. Well here it is, finally. I was never even sure if I would be able to really do this..anyways, what you see above is exactly what I have been after, what I had in mind. Three.js is *excellent*.
This is ongoing artwork – the structures will change over time as I modify (and mostly add to) each of them. There will be occasional updates, like this one, where I take snapshots and record animations of the current state of the art (haha) – state of the artwork.
And from there you will find the results in my online shop – prints and paintings drawn from occasional updates of continuously evolving (and theoretically endless) spontaneously expanding online artwork structures.
Architecture of the psyche.
Note that this animation and others that I am working on like it, make excellent concert/performance backdrops, slowly and unpredictably expanding over time to form a very personal and human structure.
