These are actually sketches (they are Processing sketches as well) in preparation for an online work by the same name. People will interact with the application and their actions will ‘grow’ a tree – much as you see in the animations below.
The following animations were drawn by hand, using my own drawing program, originally developed for the Ukraine Project, that I use to ‘play back’ a drawing. The order of the squares, as they were originally drawn, are played back with corresponding notes. These notes are also chosen manually and meant to be random. The colours as well. All of the elements that define these artworks – the colours and placement, as always, are defined by the net architecture. ‘Hand made randomness’ – the forms are meant to be random and the colours roughly even in their distribution (like white noise). So the algorithm is: 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). 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). The entire space must be filled.
I followed this process three times: tree01, tree02, tree03. The playbacks you see are the order the squares were drawn in. You are witnessing the manual fulfilling of an algorithm. Even though this was done on a computer the algorithm is actually internalized by me. I just use the computer for playback and display (and many many other things yet to be learned and discovered).
The fourth animation is a playback of all three at once. This was done programmatically to see how much my computer can handle – turns out to be more than this – there was no problem with playback and what you see in all of these videos are screen captures from a screen recorder. Anyways, this means that for each frame there are three notes being played and three coloured squares being drawn – not really a lot to ask (cannot wait to get into shaders!!).
As mentioned earlier, this is a warm up for an online app* – a tree builder. I plan on using eight keys (on the computer keyboard – numbers 1 through 8) to allow people to construct a tree based on the rules described above. The keys will not affect the results in a predictable way but they still will be responsible for having generated the tree. The decisions as to what colour, and when to branch are left to a semi-random process. This is an important aspect to my interactive work and you will encounter it often in my descriptions. I am interested in using these strategies to capture living presence through gesture. By mediating the decision making process, I am significantly attenuating the exercise of deliberate control – composing. This makes the action far more mundane and the living presence that is transmitted/communicated through those gestures is not as complicated by artistic expression – the exercise of human intention. So the content is simpler, easier to identify, and unconfused. The process, however, is not entirely random either – semi-random. The moment when a key is pressed is significant as a recorded human gesture. Even though how that button affects the results is deliberately obscured (if not made impossible to discern) – it is still significant when keys are pressed. The action is still responsible, in a removed way but a way nonetheless, for determining the final forms of the artwork and that action is triggered by a physical human gesture.
There is a good discussion here, at the bottom of the page, of how human presence is asserted no matter what. But I am interested in the psychic content of any human action and the physical gesture is a direct source of this content – so the physical gesture is essential. Everything cannot be entirely defined algorithmically by using, for example, random number generators. That is too removed (though, as alluded to above, still valid as a source of living presence). Incidentally, gesture happens to be the action of much art making – painting, playing music, writing, dancing.
* I describe a lot of plans on this website – sometimes they will manifest exactly as described, sometimes not.
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tree01
tree02
tree03
trees01–03
An amalgamation of all three trees – all three trees playing at the same time.
cellular automata
Using different cellular automata systems to ‘play’ the trees like an instrument. These audio/visual results serve as a way of decoding some of the creative content of the tree structure.