_There are no artifacts. There are only interpretations._

Glass is about the illusion of simplicity that cocoons us in our everyday existence. A glance at Glass may suggest a foam of bubbles or pebbles under clear water. But on inspection, these simple pictures dissolve. Instead of disks one finds stacked panes of translucent glass, intersecting and overlapping. There is dissonance between fine-scale chaos and the harmony of the aggregate. In Glass, two levels of reality -- panes of glass and the foam of bubbles -- are brought close together in scale, so that our oversimplified impression yields a palpable disquiet.

What appears simple is often anything but. Consider a standard wooden desk. To our eyes, it looks solid and continuous, but we know that it is made of atoms, tiny electrons orbiting nuclei. And these subatomic particles are themselves not like miniature solar systems, but creatures of quantum mechanics, stranger than we can imagine. The vast difference in scale between the atomic and the macroscopic hides this complex reality, but fundamentally it is the same phenomenon shown here.

Glass continues my exploration of emergence. While in previous work I explored how simple systems can create complex, emergent forms, here the interest is in the converse: how coherence is often deceptive, masking a complex underlying reality.

Glass draws on the aesthetic of Shin Hanga artists Hiroshi Yoshida and Kawase Hasui, and abstract expressionist Sonja Sekula. In live view, Glass has ambient motion: the shadows evolve, imperceptibly slowly.

The following variations & controls are possible. You may need to click on the canvas before they are active. For a high-resolution output, use the pixel density controls. For example, on a standard laptop, an image saved at pixel density 5 will be approximately 3200 x 4000 pixels, and therefore suitable for printing at ~ 11" x 13" at 300 dpi.

Variations (require redrawing):

f -- fit-to-screen on/off
o -- outline on/off

Controls:

s   -- save as png
spacebar  -- pause/unpause ( useful to reduce CPU load in Live mode )
b -- border on/off ( useful for printing )
1-9  -- set pixel density (default=2 on retina displays)
+/-  -- increase/decrease pixel density

Glass

InC is many things.

A tribute to the musical piece "In C" composed by Terry Riley in 1964. A multi-year Tanztheater project, directed by established choreographer Barbara Altissimo. A random walk through the canvas whose outcome is a series of short design fragments, composed for an indefinite number of performers/collectors, much like the original composition by Terry Riley. All in all, InC is my little contribution to beauty.

25% of the proceeds will be donated to local non-profit organizations dedicated to spreading beauty and helping talented and needy people.

Pointila explores what happens when you combine the meticulous dots reminiscent of Pointillistic painting techniques with the channelled randomness of generative art, whilst also examining how subtle changes in parameters can paint similar forms in different styles.

Pointila is designed for display and interaction. Clicking on a live mint will trigger an animation loop between the primary and secondary palettes, click again to pause. Press 0, 1, 2, 3 or 4 on your keyboard to change glitch state. Press S to download a high resolution print.

Pointillism emerged from a collision of art and science in late 19th century French painting. Developed by Georges Seurat, his appeal to science, rigour and order built upon the broken brushstrokes of the Impressionists, as painting began to reckon with the emergence of the new technology of photography. Unbeknownst to Seurat, this response to one technology would foreshadow another – that of digital displays and pixels.

Rigour and order was manifest in the distinct dots of colour that give Pointillism its name. From a distance, the eye mixes these dots into vibrant, luminous scenes. This optical mixing bears a striking similarity to the way pixels work to display images on screen for us today.

“It’s done mechanically?” was a question posed at an 1894 Neo-Impressionist exhibition. The answer then was no. Pointila is both more and less mechanical than the Pointillist work that provoked the question. More, in that the hand of the artist has been replaced by the work of the computer – an extension of Seurat's efforts to remove the free hand of the artist. Yet less, with the ultimate position of each of the millions of dots decided randomly, unknown to the hand of the coder.

The Pointila algorithm first divides the canvas into columns. It then traverses the canvas dropping dots along those columns. From just a handful of layers, landscapes emerge. They take on a variety of forms: from rolling plains and steep canyons to jagged peaks and dreamy moors. Some are sharp and tense, others hazy and ethereal. They are coloured with handpicked palettes and animated with bold glitches – a nod to the shared optics of Pointillism and pixels.

Subtle changes in initial parameters give rise to similar landscapes painted in different styles. Faint echos, perhaps, of the different styles we see from Seurat in the numerous studies related to his masterpiece Un dimanche à la Grande Jatte.

Pointila

_Libra_ functions as a manifesto that rejects digital art made from mimetic processes – the emulation of traditional analogue mediums and techniques. Such techniques are ubiquitous in digital art and arguably hamper the development of genuinely new aesthetics and new discourse for such a budding medium. 

Artists use digital mediums to mimic physical characteristics like brush strokes or textures of clay. It is not to say that these effects are not successful. Emulation of analogue artworks grants the digital work a natural, relatable and seemingly physical character. This use of the medium simultaneously distances the work from typical connotations of digital artworks being lifeless, flat, precise, and rigid. Perhaps this mimicry makes the work feel ‘finished.’ Digital techniques infiltrated painting in the 90s and early 2000s. At that time artists like Albert Oehlen and Jeff Elrod merged digital and analogue techniques to create a sort of ‘screen space’ on the canvas – something somewhere between a painterly space and a digital space. The Skarstedt Gallery, who originally presented Oehlen’s exhibition titled Computer Paintings, proclaimed that limitations in computers pushed Oehlen to ‘finish’ the paintings by hand – the paintings “required a human hand to enhance the final product.” That is to say that Oehlen augmented the digital works with an analogue technique. This is quite related to the current movement in digital art. Digital artists augment their works with emulations of analogue techniques. This observation raises the question: what does digital art look like when it does not emulate analogue art? Can such a work exist and feel ‘finished’?

To investigate such questions, _Libra_ generates imagery from first principles and default settings – two conflicting concepts that when brought together bring balance to the artwork. Each invocation of the algorithm directly uses the hash as the paintbrush: _Libra_ creates color-fields and blurs by placing the hash characters onto the canvas until it is sufficiently covered. Each character is initially recognizable as a letter or number – something we may all be familiar with. As the screen fills with more and more characters, some become unrecognizable and part of a larger system. Through these actions the hash is transformed into minute and carefully placed strokes that create illusions of light, space, and form that is unique to the screen space in which digital art lives. The remaining, recognizable characters ground our eye and act as a ‘staffage figure’ in a landscape painting. 

_Libra_ rejects traditional standards of aesthetics and beauty; Instead, _Libra_ embraces self-reflexivity and a contemporary definition of  kitsch – often a pejorative used to describe ‘low-brow’ or naïve artwork that is appreciated ironically or in a cult-like manner. In this series, a colored dot is dragged around the canvas both irrationally and without control. Drawing our attention in, this dot transfixes the viewer in an effort to shift the viewers’ attention from glancing at the work to a sustained look. These strokes are naïve and highly stylized – they embody the kitsch – and are mockingly-emulative of painterly marks and linework and grants the work a tone of self-reflexivity. Kitsch is obtained with drop shadows that create simple but satisfying _trompe l’oeil_ effects and fabricate a false sense of depth. Such an effect can be interpreted as humorous: this is an obvious and ironic representation of depth – it is totally fake and recognizable as fake on the flat digital display in which _Libra_ lives. 

Libra is a careful balancing act that creates form and color only to erase it.

Libra

Today the base orbiter has started to move. Oscillating harvesters had the ability to generate an enormous amount of self-sustaining energy. They seem to establish parallel communication in resonance with cosmic frequencies but I find myself unable to decode the signal into anything meaningful.

Art Blocks Presents

Glass #270

Eric De Giuli

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