Painting A Day: Digital Paintings, 2009-2019
Synthetik’s Studio Artist is a digital paint and animation program that offers all sorts of options for both still and moving images; original, photographic and AI-generated. I thought that I might, eventually, use the program live with improvising musicians and dancers.
I started with basic drawing, using pre-programmed brushes included in the software. I decided the best way to learn the software was to set myself a goal: creating a painting a day. No excuses, I had to sit down at the computer and come up with one painting every day. This was to be part my ‘practice’,’ which includes electro-acoustic music, video, teaching, and helping to run a gallery. Somehow, I thought, these paintings might relate to ideas I was exploring in my studio, on my computer, and in performance.
On May 21, 2009, I posted this image to my blog –
This, my first posted image, wasn’t all that bad. Of course, the idea behind ‘Painting A Day’ is that it doesn’t matter if the painting is good, bad or indifferent. It’s a painting and that’s all that counts. The idea is to stop being ‘self-critical’ and just let it happen, good or bad. Who cares? Well, I suppose we all care. We don’t want to waste our own and everyone else’s time. However, according an article I read in a design magazine while teaching at VCU, this caring often inhibits us, as artists, from simply ‘diving in’ and exploring a new medium.
Looking back at the first couple of hundred paintings, I can see that this was sound advice. It’s not until, somewhere in the 500’s, after nearly a year, that I got a handle on the software.
I hadn’t set an end time for the experiment. The idea was to keep on keeping on until I was working ‘as one’ with the software. The first few years it was simply fun to experiment with the possibilities that the software offered. Yes, there were limits. The painting are lo-res, 720×480 pixels, the same resolution as my video projects. Scattered throughout the blog are posts showing some of these video images. I can see now that the 10 year run of paintings influenced both my video and sound projects. In fact, they led directly to my work with Processing, which is the second set of prints in this exhibition.
Geometry: sketch_200822a
Processing is a free graphical library and integrated development environment built for the electronic arts, new media art, and visual design communities. The project was initiated in 2001 by Casey Reas and Ben Fry, both formerly with the Aesthetics and Computation Group at MIT’s Media Lab. I started using Processing in 2005.
After 10 years of one painting a day, it was time to up the ante, to move from paint program to a program that paints. Sketch_200822a, the first sketch written on August 22, 2008, creates it’s own ‘art.’ I’m not wielding a brush or mixing pigments. I’m writing code that tells the computer to create 20 images using various geometric shapes and colors, then combine 3 of these images into a frame of video, over and over again …
Here’s a flowchart for the sketch –
In the ‘declarations’ block I reserve memory 20 images, p[0-19], and 3 temporary buffers, p0-2, In the ‘setup’ block I set the resolution of the output window to a resolution of 640 x 480 pixels then create 20 images using a number of simple drawing routines. I load 3 of these images, chosen randomly, into the temporary buffers and, finally, set the frame rate and hide the cursor. In the ‘draw’ block I combine 2 of the buffers, p0-2, using one of 12 raster operations routines and output the result to the output window. Each time through the draw routine there’s a 1:10 chance that a new image will be loaded into p0-2.
Here are 3 of 20 images combined using 6 of the 12 rops –
The 3 images selected are copied from the 20 images created in setup. The source images, p[0-19] are 800×600 pixels. The destination images, p0-2, are 640×480 pixels and highlighted in the graphic above. The area copied is chosen randomly when p0-2 a new image is selected. There are only 6 rops shown; the remaining 6 rops are repeats. This doesn’t effect the animation. What does effect the animation is the use of random numbers to select images and rops, and … a happy accident that occurs when the same source image is selected for a pair of temporary buffers, then combined (see frame 22) –
Projektor: sketch_180503a
In 2015 I wrote a simple Processing sketch, a ‘film’ projector. This first sketch became a series of sketches that assemble images stored in computer memory into ‘films.’ The resulting films are ‘projected’ in real-time on the computer screen.
This sketch begins by reserving memory space for multiple images and a smaller, buffer. Then it selects and loads into memory 16 random images from 46 images stored on the computer hard drive. Next it assembles a frame by selecting 1 image, at random, from those in memory, copying a smaller piece of that image into the temporary buffer and, from there, to the display screen.
This all seems pretty simple: each frame of the film is assembled from a smaller 640×480 pixel area copied from a larger 2048×1152 pixel image.
But wait! Not only is the selection process random for the set of 16 images in memory, the 1 chosen for each frame, and the area selected from that image; but the process of copying the selected area includes 8 options for filtering, 4 options for re-sizing and 14 options for blending the area into current frame.
All this taken together means that every time I run the program it will produce a different film. From the selection of the initial images, to the order of images selected for each frame, to the area selected from each image copied to the frame and, finally, to the many options used by the copy function.
This raises some interesting questions. Where is the art? Is it a process or a product?
I wrote my first computer graphics program, in 1965. I’ve worked as a video animator, with electronic music and video synthesis, and with computer ‘mediated’ art for almost 60 years. For me, the computer is a means by which I can model the creative process. So, perhaps, the art is not the product, or in the process, but in the program itself. A ghost in the machine!
Back to the sketch, here are a couple of flowcharts: the first shows the steps in creating a single frame, the second includes code from the program broken out into the 3 major program blocks: declarations, setup and draw –
Let’s run the sketch/program. These are the first (15) frames of video. The choice of images and the options for filtering, re-sizing and blending are random and can change frame to frame –
For frame 0, the first frame, the sketch chooses image 2. There are no filter or blend options set. The image is re-sized from full frame to 3/4 size and copied to the display buffer, which for the first frame is black. For frame 1, image 1 is selected. No filter option is chosen. The image is re-sized from full frame to 3/4 size and, this time, blended with the contents of the display buffer using the HARD_LIGHT option. Image 0 is selected for frame 2. The filter, re-size and blend options remain the same. Options start to change for frame 3: there’s a new filter option, ERODE, and a new blend option ADD …
And so it goes. Depending on the frame rate, this video clip could be 1.25 to 15 seconds long. Like the choice of images, the options for filtering, re-sizing and blending; the frame rate is random. It varies from 1 to 12 fps.
Noh TV 