Tell us about how your work created for “Notes From a Neutron Star” is connected to Peter Saville’s iconic cover for “Unknown Pleasures.”
My-first-plot #0 is directly inspired by—almost copies—the cover of Unknown Pleasures. Actually, I think a lot of generative artists' first works are inspired by it. I was surprised when I was making my first plot and it so closely resembled the cover. It’s a contradictory piece for me in that it so quickly became a part of the collective consciousness despite expressing something really not seen before. I think it is remarkable that Peter Saville’s work was so open and so new that it continues to be imitated and remains receptive to that imitation. I think that is a wonderful quality of the work.
How does this work reflect the direction that your artistic practice is going?
I love this question. Especially (and somewhat ironically) in the context of this work, because this is the first plotter work I ever made! But it actually exemplifies how I think about this series—I think that these first works contain so much of my self and my practice precisely because they are my first works, because they are genuine experiments with very few assumptions or preconceptions about what is possible. In my practice, I am continually trying to inhabit the mind of a beginner, and unlearn the biases that I tend towards. I think a lot of learning can be figuring out what not to pay attention to, but I don’t want to privilege any one thing above another. One of the reasons I make generative art is because I believe it can be effective for confronting aspects of bias (because the work must be described explicitly at a low-level) and because it shows one idea/algorithm from dozens of different but equally valid angles/outputs.
What role do music and other forms of media play in inspiring you throughout your creative process?
More than anything, music has taught me how to approach generative art as performance. Live music and live performances exist specifically because of their audience–without the audience it is a rehearsal. Similarly, generative art is often only created, only exists at all, because of the act of the viewer or collector. In my opinion, these moments are in many ways a co-creation between artist and audience. I’ve done a lot of experimenting with coding and music to understand this better—making album covers, making music videos, live coding concert visuals, even live plotting at concerts.
What has been the most rewarding aspect of your artistic career thus far?
For me I think it has been the close and communal investigation of algorithms—trying to understand how a work was made, exploring and curating a series as a community, sharing ideas about algorithms with other artists. I find investigating nature and natural algorithms through generative imitation can be the most fruitful. The algorithms that artists work with are not computer abstractions, in my opinion they are fundamental processes that aspects all over the world follow. Peter Saville’s visualization of a pulsar is a testament to that. Thinking about these algorithms, learning from them, teaching workshops on them, to me that is a radical and wonderful way of engaging in the world.
What’s next for you and your art? What are you excited about for the rest of the year?
I’m continuing to push my process with creating physical algorithmic art. The plotter has been for me, like many other coders, the first way to bring algorithms into the physical world—but I’ve been expanding my practice and media for the last three years. My next two projects are generative wooden chairs and generative ceramic vases.
