Universal Algorithm for Basic Human Experience

 

Universal Algorithm for Basic Human Experience 

by Rev. Luke Murphy

I have an anxious relationship with graphs and diagrams. On the one hand, who doesn't love a really nice piece of data visualization? On the other hand, how often do you see ones that take it to far?
The artist statement for this piece says of the graphs it generates: "they are both the rationalization and visualization of things that resist measurement."

I like this piece because it articulates the reasons for the allergic reaction I sometimes have to graphs and diagrams, the suspicion I carry in me that all these visualizations do more to obscure the truth than represent it. Of course I’m mostly wrong. Data visualizations, really brilliant ones, communicate way more than words or perhaps even images can. I just have this inherent distrust of things with axes and labels. I really can’t explain it. My dad’s a mathematician. I did pretty well in AP calc.

But of course this piece in its absurdity enacts the distortion that I’m uncomfortable with. It’s the requirement to distill a complex situation into variables, to see correlations and assume correspondence.  

I also like the UI aspect:

Webart is so weird and exciting because there’s no other conceptual art form that I can think of that works in interactivity so seamlessly. With earlier forms of generative art that required something of the viewer, we are highly conscious of behaving in a way that we wouldn’t normally (how frequently do we fill the walls of a room with nearly identical squiggly lines?) But you can engage with a piece of Webart and believe that you’re answering your e-mail.

Boolean Nature

 

I don't totally get this, but I'm writing about it anyway because it's interesting. It's a series of 3D images by Hugo Arcier in which he has re-created a piece of nature and then subtracted a sphere.  He uses 3D imaging software to make pictures of ice and water and then deletes from them. In his words:

In logic and computer programming, a Boolean operator is a type of variable between two states. In computer-generated imagery, Boolean operations enable us to subtract, add or create an intersection between two objects.
In this series I subtract a sphere from a landscape. The latter becomes hollow. It is sterile, it lacks something, the breath of life.
It is a morbid image: a Boolean nature.

I see this piece as exploring the boundary between synthetic and natural. Or maybe the virtual and the physical? It’s interesting to me that he chose to re-create his own images of nature, rather than use “real” ones.  Perhaps it is no longer necessary to take images from nature in order for them to be real. Perhaps the point is that we can create such convincing images of life with software that we no longer need to represent it, we can just make it up.

And then he goes and makes these virtual images real, physical, by creating sculptures from his images. It makes me very confused, because the sculpture is only an image. It looks like a natural form,  marred by this perfect spherical subtraction, but it isn’t a natural form.

My favorite image is the third one, entitled Sea. The missing sphere is less obvious here than the others but for that reason even more haunting. 

I found this piece profoundly disturbing. I’m not sure what else to say about it.