It’s about time I started drawing again. Been a long time. Recently realised that drawing and sketching can be massively useful for fast-prototyping ideas (obvious when I think about it but think I went a bit too digital or nothing in my approach over the past few years).
Completely forgot about artrage. It’s a painting package allowing you to make paintings digitally. Been a long time since I painted for real so found this program great to use and lots of fun. My recent effort below (I framed it separately).
I love the idea of computer generated art, problem is that computers lack that subjectivity that determines what we judge to be ‘good’ or ‘bad’ art. That’s why using computers for what they are good at, processing millions of functions a second, alongside a person’s innate ability to ‘choose’ between two or more objects is a very interesting idea. Take del.icio.us popular, Amazon’s web services, Digg , YouTube etc etc. What rises to the top is generally considered ‘good’ the millions of less ‘good’ items remain languishing in the chaos. I have experimented with Genetic Algorithms to produce images for a while now, problem is that as each image is technically unique, you tend to end up with chaos.
William Poundstone, author of The Recursive Universe, contrived an analogy to illustrate why searching huge Borgian libraries of knowledge is as difficult as searching the huge Borgian library of nature itself. Imagine, Poundstone said, that there is a library with all possible videos. Like all Borgian spaces, most of the items in this library are full of noise and random grayness. A typical tape would be two hours of snow. The main problem with searching for a viewable video is that no title, call name, or symbol of any sort could represent a random tape in any less space or time than the tape itself. Most of the items in a Borgian library are incompressible into anything shorter than the work itself. (This irreducibility is the current definition of randomness.) To search the tapes, they must be watched, and therefore the information, time, and energy needed to sort through all the tapes would exceed the information, time, and energy needed to create the tape you wanted, no matter what the tape was.
Finally got round to scanning some of my artwork I produced whilst on a Fine Art degree.
Ah…can’t quite remember the reasoning behind much of the work now. But it had something to do with the paradox of marketing (and thus beatifying) something inherently ugly (i.e. frozen chicken), I think it was supposed to be an ultra-realistic representation of the process of promotion whilst simultaneously attempting to deconstruct that process. Or maybe I just got a kick out of painting six foot frozen chickens in oil.
