Bugs
This animation was written in Processing using a 3D array of pixels to attempt to emulate the motion of a swarm of insects inside an inferred glass box. 1600 hundred pixels equals 1600 bugs. Please click here to see the program running live as a Java applet. It represents a slight shift in my work - thinking about how I might begin to produce sculpture which moves between real and virtual space. This is a sketch towards that idea.
In Search of the Miraculous (after Bas Jan Ader)
Computer generated image printed on a postcard.
These images comprise randomly generated patterns, derived from an algorithm that generates a unique constellation of points each time the code is run. As soon as a point is plotted outside of the frame, the program exits and automatically saves the resulting image to disc.
Click here to see the program running interactively on the Open Processing website.
Prototype for an Existing Design (3D print from a digital model)
Prototype for an Existing Design (Digital model)
Still a work in progress, this digital model of an analogue form is removed from its context, disconnected from the rest of the system and therefore left without function. The surface of the record is missing but is inferred by the oscillating motion of the stylus in animation. The interdependance of these two objects renders each redundant on its own, suggesting, perhaps, a breakdown of communication.
72 Hours (bespoke computer program, laptop)
This simple computer program moves a square across and downwards through an inferred grid, and loops. This is the first program that I wrote from scratch, the title referring to the three days that it took me to write it, making the unremarkable product incommensurate with the amount of time spent creating it. A delay is written into the code, so that the program itself takes 72 hours to complete a single loop.
How I Spent the Time I Didn’t Spend with You: Failure (3D print from a digital model, plywood, cable ties)
Based on Boog from Sony’s Open Season, the bear is digitally modelled from a beginner’s workbook for the commercial animation software, Maya. Since the book was for an earlier version of the software, the modeling process threw up problems. Subsequently, output as a 3D print, the model embodies my inexperience of using this complex software. Furthermore, when the file was sent to the 3D printer, the machine failed to finish building the form, revealing a sharp cross-section that describes the process.
The bear stands on an unstable plinth that was shaped using traditional boat-building techniques and is provisionally held together by cable ties, so that the entire work has a sense of the prototype.
How I Spent the Time I Didn’t Spend with You: Endeavour (Plywood, cable ties)
Boats and boat-building signify time spent in hobbyist activities that sit somewhere between work and leisure. These are often solitary pursuits, undertaken in private spaces. Full of holes and lashed together with cable-ties, my boat-shaped object is unfit for purpose, or perhaps the project has been abandoned or sidelined in favour of more pressing tasks.
How I Spent the Time I Didn’t Spend with You: Ambition (Homemade speakers, custom electronics, code written to microcontroller)
Homemade speakers relay a Morse coded message back and forth across the gallery void, continually transmitted but never received. The entire system is made from scratch, from the speakers (boxes, cones, electromagnetic coils) to the amplifier circuit and source code written to a micro-controller, which controls the entire system. In order to illustrate the arbitrary complexity of the system - and thereby the pointlessness of my endeavour (since this might easily have been achieved using an MP3 player and amplifier) - every component is visible; the circuitry is fixed to the wall and the back removed from the speaker box to reveal my hobbyist process. The message, however, is not decoded.
A video of the work can be found here.
17.0
(Digital print on watercolour paper, 297mm x 420mm)
