Sydney Salamy: Looking Outwards-06

The work is called Schotter (Gravel Stones) by Georg Nees, created in 1966. It is a vertical piece with a slightly tilted rectangle made of little clear squares that slowly separates and comes apart as the viewer looks further down it. It was meant to show the effects of change and relationship between order and disorder.

• I really like the simplicity of the piece. It’s hard to explain why, I just like how Nees was able to do what he did with so little. I also like how despite the simplicity, he was able to still convey his message about order developing into disorder and vice versa (depending how the viewer looks at it). A lot of times, art this simple, if it has any meaning at all, tends to be very obscure, leaving it all up to the viewer. Here, the piece is still simple and leaves some interpretation, but there is still pretty clear intention and meaning behind it.

• According to Media Art Net, the piece was produced by the programming language ALGOL, and was created by random generators. It was made by “invoking the SERIE procedure” (which controls the composition process), with the “non-parametric procedure QUAD”. QUAD is located in lines four through 15 of the generator and generates the squares with constant lengths and random locations along with varying angles. The position of the squares at certain points are influenced by random generators, such as J1, and the angles by J2. Counter index 1, invoked by each QUAD call, controls the “successively increasing variation between the relative coordinates P and Q, and the angle position PSI of a given square…” So essentially, Nees had influence over his work, creating an outline for what it would look like, but the end result was left up to the pseudo-random numbers.

• Georg Nees is considered a founder of computer art and graphics. He seemed to experiment with what he was given, using languages like ALGOL, made for scientific computers, to create his works. He experimented quite a bit with random numbers. A lot of his work seemed to involve basic clear shapes and/or lines, along with a little pseudo-randomness. This can all be seen in Schotter, since the shapes being used are simple squares, and there is a bit of randomness to things like their placement and angles.