Tina Franks “20160815” Project (2016)

A project that I find inspirational, is Tina Franks’s “20160815” created in 2016 with Peter Rehberg on sound.

What I admire about his project is the way combines electronic with a natural phenomenon that humans experience. The project wonders if androids would see phosphenes, which are luminous floating shapes that humans see when we close our eyes tightly and stimulate our retinas (aka rub our eyeballs). She thought that android’s would interpret these as raw liquid crystals, similar to those that are in LCD screens and electronic devices, just more raw and less crystal clear. She combined that with Peter Rehberg’s electronic music, and its a very interesting and cool project to see/hear! I admire the combination of electronics and humans, as our world is very much trying to blur the line between the two and bring us closer to our devices. Thus, Tina Frank’s project is not only relevant and inspiring to other artist during our time, but it is also very beautiful to see.

I am not sure how the algorithm works in this generated work, but I think that the work is based on randomly changing between created pictures of lines. Tina Frank also uses pixels from old video test strips from televisions to create some of these pixel images. The pixel lines are probably also similarly created by random generation of color pixels within a strip of space. Beyond that, I am not sure how this art was made.

The algorithm supports the artists vision as the different generated images are randomly spliced and cut together one after another that is similar to how phosphenes happen naturally. It is also similar to how an old TV would glitch with static or the colorized testing strip. The world she created is coarse, jarring and unfamiliar, something that she wanted to happen, as the thought of a future with HD implants in the brain or with android’s, is something very foreign and remote to many of us today.