Category: LookingOutwards-02

The series of works I picked is “Quantum Superpositions” made by Markos Kay. These generative art pieces were created using a simulation that is inspired by the events in the Large Hadron Collider, but all the imagery is original and not actual images from the Collider. The artist used an original simulator to generate the images and then superimposed them on each other to represent different quantum properties.

I find this piece to be really interesting because of the interdisciplinary nature combining aspects of quantum mechanics and digital art. These pieces come together in a way that is visually striking, especially considering the complexity and randomness of the generated images that are overlayed.

Markos Kay’s body of work is composed of mostly video art which differs from this series of stills. While the stills are all pulled from video simulations, the intricacies of the particle interactions and the complicated quantum mechanics are better represented in the superimposed images that the artist has created.

Link to the artist’s website: https://www.mrkism.com/superpositions.html

‘variations on a definition’ by poet and programmer allison parrish is a series of poems that were produced by breaking words down into numbers that correspond to their constituent sounds using a stats-based model of the english language. the program then automatically mixes and recombines these numbers to blur and corrupt the original phonetic features of the words used in the poems.

I admire how this project makes use of algorithmically-defined representation to highlight the malleability of language over space and time, especially in the context of the social internet and postmodern poetics. it’s a precise and elegant way to confuse language, which falls in line with parrish’s research on contemporary use of language at NYU.

In the second week, I already found I made progress. Last week the program I wrote has some problems, I spent hours to looks at it and trying to debug still did not work. This week open that program again and immediately saw what the problem was. 

In this week’s project, I found the most challenging part is to connect the artistic idea to the code – in what way do I choose to realize it? It’s almost like creating a machine and a system or thinking of myself’s thinking. Or like navigation, looking at the map and figuring out how to go to my destination. Sometimes I have to create my own pathway. 

Looking at Leander Herzog‘s website, I am fascinated by how much computers can generate and we call it art. I found the interactive art approach interesting. It’s important to think about the way people interact – is it by moving the mouse, by pressing the mouse (in the condition of giving them a mouse and a screen); by touching, by looking at the camera, or by speaking to a microphone… And how do we suggest they to do so? By using visual implications in order to stimulate their curiosity?

Currently, I’m glad that I know how to make a program that captures mouse movement. But other skills still need to be learned.

And most significant to think – in your generative art, is it a pure image, for the sake of visual effect, or it embeds some other information, or do you endow it a meaning? And do you come up with an idea and then create a program accordingly to realize your idea; or do you create a visual effect and then associate a meaning? What’s your intention? What’s the relationship between you and the image you create? Both ways for me makes sense and feels equal to me. But important to think about.