Raster. *Screens no longer only frame and display virtual spacetime. Connected together and surrounding us on all sides, their framings and displays have also opened, activated, and added another spatiotemporal dimension to the four in which all of us live.*
—Vivian Sobchack, *From Screen-Scape to Screen-Sphere: A Meditation in Medias Res*
An exploration of a technical concept I call "pixel overpainting."
Rasterized procedural brush strokes with low transparency slowly layer themselves over each other in a rhythmic loop until they achieve colorful equilibrium. They continue to overpaint themselves endlessly. The resulting color mixtures are then quantized and dithered to separate them into patches of pixels that recall the discrete materiality of the screen: a strictly digital variation on color field painting. The resulting texture is not a skeuomorphic grain but an overt reference to the universe of screens that surround us every day. Electric light arranged in a grid, fluttering and flickering everywhere all the time.
SILICA. Silica is a series of 50 animated digital paintings made with a custom real-time painting software that builds on the tradition of color field painting. Each piece is uniquely generated through a stochastic generative process involving simulated paintbrushes, limited colour palettes, video feedback, and graphics quantization algorithms. The brush strokes repeat themselves continuously producing layered colour mixtures which bleed together and are then quantized and separated into limited colors. Like halftone images, the resulting texture is a kind of primer on digital colour theory, where dithered pixels produce the illusion of a mixed colour. The animations loop seamlessly and are made of 90 unique individual still frames. Each animation is formatted as a 720x960 GIF.S
SILICA is part of the group exhibition Imperfections. Through a series of long form projects by generative artists, this exhibition explores the role imperfections play in great artworks, and how the pursuit of artistic perfection appears to be a paradoxical endeavour.
Printers. PRINTERS is a study of rasterized type and bitmap imagery. It builds on the tradition of ASCII and typographic art, blending dithering techniques with chunky, pixelated glyphs. Here, the movement and blending of color is interpreted as a monochrome composition of recognizable pixel patterns taken from legacy video games and operating systems. What appears as typography is actually a custom set of 8x8 pixel patterns rendered in a GLSL shader that produces a conceptual tension between low-res graphics and high-power GPU computation.