hqq – LookingOutwards-01

Hi guys! One piece of computationally-driven art that excites me is Pele-Mele and Boite-Noire by Olivier Ratsi and Martin Messier. It was on display at the Wood Street Galleries in Downtown Pittsburgh during the summer of 2016. I was particularly inspired by the way that the pieces warp the perception of space to turn a white box gallery into an extremely disorienting field of projections. It uses an optical process called anamorphosis (honestly, I had no idea what this was called until I read about it in this review), which gives people in the space the ability to warp their perception of the piece based on their position and optical height, with any combination of those two variables yielding a different composition.

I’m also particularly inspired by the process that Ratsi and Messier followed in creating the piece. They developed a computing process that took Renaissance styles of anamorphosis and regenerated them within specific spaces. The piece was the result of a fully developed and customized software generation that Ratsi created himself. This expresses the potential that more antiquated artistic principles can have on computational art and design created today.