alana


abstract

06.13.06 Today was a lovely day. It began or didn't end yesterday. We had Tandy's class meet at our house and that took on the form of an inspirational sppech. The class size has consistently been dwindling—we ended up having only five people. Everyone brought very tasty food—Sumit made 'lamb' sandwiches and other people brought veggies. bagels and lox, hummus, trader joe's crackers, and a fake cheese spread. I'll have to remember to look into finding it, because the texture was startlingly cheese-like. Tandy brought her signature soup contribution. She has invited us to dinner at her house in Felton this coming weekend. Felton is a little woodsy town where she has settled in nature. Her partner apparently is a composer and has a land art slideshow for us. It reminds me of the spirit of Professors like Bassler; with that great sensibility of ancient art. I should let him know that I trekked to Machu Picchu. It took him seventy-years to get there, and I was able to go at twenty. In the words of Morrissey, 'I'm so glad to grow older.' It will be nice to not have to be the young one, although twenty-two isn't exactly advanced in age.



background

I hope that this year I can actually celebrate, since for the past few years I haven't done anything. Perhaps a party or such a fest. Today is Olivia's birthday and she is having a 'fruity drink' party which sounds excellent. I still need to meet her nice Jewish Brian boy. Abbyo is going to San Luis for the occassion. Perhaps they will have a Zoolander inspired sassy 'dance off,' in the spirit of a walk off.



description

This afternoon was the Camille Utterback presentation at the MAH. Not many people came which seems a shame, but also indicative of how Digital Art culture has its own sphere. After her talk I was curious to find out more of her process. I asked her about how she establishes her visual style. The response I got was intriguing—a combination of programmetric elements and her own graphical source material. She described that for her latest painterly piece, 'Untitled Six,' she actually found a painted sketch in an old notebook which has the same visual qualities as the software piece.



analysis

This observation was fascinating—after all of the software oriented work, she is going back to painted elements. Especially interesting was her observation that she now draws and paints lines by hand and then scans them into her pieces. The painted fragments coalese in the software she writes to animate her work. This approach seems entirely new in software art and also indicative of a traditional art background.



conclusion

It reminded me of the Tim Craighead talk that Levi and I attended. The artist's progression in painted media starts with the figurative, moves into the abstract, and then returns to figurative elements. Utterback's work today seems the first example of such a progression in programmetric art. It gave me insight into constructing my 'interactive interiors' installation piece. The environment Utterback codes graphics in is OpenGL and her program base for motion tracking is C++. Knowing the environment she works in is about as revealing as saying that an author's media is the pen. Still, it made me realize that you need to create a heavy-duty system to handle interactive installations.



references

Right now the sketch of my piece is written in processing. I love using processing and supporting the community it represents. Ultimately I need to transfer the code base to something more robust, as modeled by Utterback.