Digital Hybrids

For this work, I combine my background in computers with my studio art; specifically painting. These new explorations in my work were originally driven by pure desire to see the outcomes. Over time there became a deeper understanding of the purpose of the work; to satiate a yearning for organic art in our increasingly digitized era. In these two series (Animated Paintings and Generative Art) I am creating a hybridized experience between screen-based technology and artistic reality.

Animated Paintings

Animation allows me to express the motion and story of my paintings even further. Bringing my painting style forward was a natural fit for the frame by frame techniques that I prefer to use when creating my animated pieces. Using the interwoven manner of my brushwork in my paintings, I have developed my own styles and approaches to creating these short-run clips of life outside of technology. The game of blurring the lines between nature and art and technology, in an attempt to harmonize them becomes my quest here. Creating something old with something new. Paying homage, and cherishing heritage.

Generative Art: Starling Rush

Generative art is where you allow chance to dictate the final outcome of a composited image. For my Starling Rush PFP (picture for proof) project, I rendered the first 100 images of a typical 10,000 image Python project from both hand-painted and digital assets. For Starling Rush, I combined elements from both my original paintings and digital details and let chance dictate the eventual combination of any number of options to be had from 10 different visual traits with anywhere from 0-9 variations per trait. This exercise helped me see my own work in a different light, freeing me up for additional ideas later. It also produced some dynamic and surprising combinations. Below are just a few of the first 100 birds from the Starling Rush project.

It bears mentioning the impact this project had on my practice. While setting this project up, I could feel my identity getting tightly packaged up for dissolution by the process to be taken over by another system; all the collateral I had invested in for my visual language, mashed up like a chop salad. In these works I feel I'm giving up part of my identity to another hand that I have no relationship with other than my own shared meta data; completely sans feelings. I'd be lying if I said that I wasn't curious, the entire time, about how this would turn out with my own art. Making use of this chunky collaboration with chance, I was inspired by some of the combinations of clashing elements that I would not have come across on my own. My take on this collaboration is that for certain projects, AI and generative art can be a very useful tool for gaining fresh insight into an idea.

Curated: Starling Rush

If you don't let chance run the show, then you can curate your elements to create more cohesive feeling pieces. However, this gets into the territory of originality. Which set is more original, and which one is more authentic, and can they be the same one, or all?