Signal to Noise

scroll down for words :)

It’s challenging for me to say my art is about something. Such a statement invites the viewer to search my work for the same meaning, and if they don’t find it, my words will appear to be a disingenuous attempt to inflate the piece’s significance. This concern also stems from the approach I take to making art. I usually start with the algorithm, having a vague sense of what the final output will look like and a goal to find something that is visually interesting. As I develop a project, I find ways its algorithmic or visual elements connect to concepts I want to talk about, but I feel uncertain saying that the project is about these ideas when they weren’t driving it from its inception.

Signal to Noise is about this possible disconnect between the viewer and me. As an abstract series, there are many possible interpretations of the work. The ways I see it relate to things around me are all filtered through my experience as an artist. It is not about these particular connections. Someone else is likely to approach it with different reference points, and therefore may experience it in an entirely different way. Signal to Noise is about the possibility and challenge of communicating in a noisy environment.

However, I will take some time to talk about the thoughts I had while working on this project. Hopefully they will offer new ways to view and relate to these images.

One thing this idea of unclear signals brings to mind is the uncertain ways inspirations influence my work. Some of them are very clear: the color palettes, for example, are inspired by a variety of artists, including Cecily Brown, Wassily Kandinsky, Takashi Murakami, Joan Mitchell, Aya Takano, and Matthew Wong. These artists have very distinct subjects and styles, but each uses a wide range of intense colors within individual paintings, which I sought to emulate to create a sense of overwhelmingness when confronted with these noisy images. Other forms of inspiration are not so direct. Consciously or not, everything I make is going to be influenced by the art that I consume, leading me to question what it means for something to be novel. The breadth of Signal to Noise represents my attempts to explore possibility space until I discover something new, while at the same time reflecting the disparate sources that I draw upon.

While I appreciate art of all kinds, I spend a significant amount of time looking specifically at generative art. These days it is mostly because I am a fan and small-time collector of the medium, but as I am a self-taught artist (with a prior decade of coding experience), I learned to make generative art by looking at the images other generative artists were making and trying to imagine how they did so. Many generative artworks function such that the algorithm is implied by the final output. These works can be minimalist in the sense that they do not require any other knowledge of the medium to understand the visual concepts they explore. However, the generative art that excites me the most produces outputs that I never would have predicted, which is much more achievable when it is not clear how the code functions. As I always try to push the ability of my scripts to produce surprising variations, I end up adding layer after layer until the process is no longer discernable simply from the output. The result of this approach is that these works no longer exist in a vacuum; they are much better understood with the context of other generative art to show what is possible within the medium. In Signal to Noise, I invite this conversation with other contemporary works.

One common discussion around contemporary generative art is that of skeuomorphism, where digitally generated images intentionally emulate features of physical objects, such as paint on a canvas. I believe the skeuomorphic approach is often attractive not only because of a learned association between fine art and specific types of mark-making, but also because these finer textural details add a level of richness to an image, maintaining interest across length scales. Each output in Signal to Noise is made up of hundreds of thousands of tiny perfect circles. This approach acknowledges that it is visually interesting to have small details, but intentionally constructs these details with one of the basic building blocks of digital images. The final result is an image that has the same kind of appealing texture when viewed on a small screen or from far away, but close up seems disconcertingly simplistic, like it was made in Kid Pix. These dissonant experiences ask the viewer to thoughtfully consider what are their aesthetic preferences and where do they originate from.

Creating texture is an interesting coding challenge, but it is orthogonal to understanding the autonomous systems at the heart of generative art. While pseudorandom number generators are a powerful tool to create series of unique but related images, I think not enough time is spent considering what it means to create meaningful variation between outputs. In my work I always try to empower my algorithms to make as many critical decisions as possible while maintaining a cohesive vision. In previous works, my scripts constructed mathematical expressions used to control the time evolution of various sets of particles. In Signal to Noise my script does more coding on my behalf, this time writing a different shader for each output. I am a big fan of Zach Liebermann, and I feel this meta-programming approach takes inspiration from his daily practice. While there is a lot of diversity in the works he shares, they often involve iterating on or revisiting a set of core ideas. Signal to Noise attempts to condense that type of exploration into a single cohesive series.

Thoughts like, “where is this idea coming from,” or, “how does this art fit with contemporaneous works,” naturally arise during the creation of any project. The longer I work as an artist, the more time it feels like I spend thinking about these questions, yet I still don’t come up with answers that feel any more satisfying than the ones I had for the previous work. I see that uncertainty reflected back at me in the complex images that make up Signal to Noise. As much as uncertainty can be a negative feeling, I continue to be compelled to make art, so the series also represents acceptance of things that will never be certain.