About

I started experimenting with generative art in 1999, in Flash, back when the web still felt like it might become something strange, and I have been at it ever since. It was an awkward thing to place back then. It was made by a machine, so it was not consider “art”. It was made by me, so it was not software. Nobody knew what shelf it went on, including me, best I has was paint with code and after a while I stopped worrying about it and just kept making the art.

It went up on my own walls. For years that was the whole audience, and it turned out to be the best possible arrangement. When nobody is waiting for a piece, nothing is riding on it, and you can chase an idea purely because you want to see where it ends up. Most of what I know I learned in that stretch.

The tools came and went while that was going on. After Flash, Processing next. A generation of us discovered we could draw with a for-loop. Then openFrameworks, vvvv, Cinder. Java. Go. nannou and many more I have long fogoten. I learned each one properly and made things in each one, and eventually hit the same wall in every one of them. At some point the framework stops being the thing that lets you draw and becomes the thing you are drawing around.

So I began writing my own. Not out of purism, but out of impatience. I wanted the tool to have the shape of the idea, rather than the idea having to take the shape of the tool. What I build now is small and specific and mine, and everything it makes comes out as vector.

I care about that more than is reasonable, and I suspect it goes back to Flash. That was a vector tool. You drew a shape, not a picture of a shape, and it stayed sharp at any size you cared to ask for. Something about that lodged in me and never came out. A vector has no size. It is a description of a curve, not a grid of pixels pretending to be one, and it means a piece I make on a laptop can be printed the size of a wall without losing a thing. There is no original resolution to be faithful to. The work is the instructions, and the instructions are infinite. I have never been able to explain to anyone’s satisfaction why that moves me, but it does.

Mostly I let the art lead. A piece starts as one small idea, a grid, a mask, a way of cutting one surface out of another, and then I follow it more than I steer it. It moves like a dream moves, by its own logic, arriving at the case I did not think of and the composition that should not work. The mistakes fold into the intent, the intent keeps flowing, and after a while I cannot tell you where one stopped and the other began, which is exactly when it is going well. That is not a loss of control. It is the reason to work this way at all. If the output only ever held what I already had in my head, I could have drawn it myself and spared us both the trouble.

I am drawn to where mathematics, code, and mythology overlap. What I like is when rules and chance and plain accident get woven together tightly enough that the result looks meant. A symbol. A relic. A page from a book in a language that never existed. Nothing intended it, and yet your whole mind reaches for the story behind it, the hand that must have made it, the thing it must have been for. That reaching is the subject. I am not illustrating a myth, I am building the conditions where one wants to form.

And then there is colour, which is the real reason, and the least sophisticated thing about me. I will spend weeks on palettes. I build them in the hundreds and then sit and rate them one at a time like a lunatic, because I cannot say in words why one pairing sings and another dies, but I can tell you instantly which is which. That is the part of my taste I cannot articulate, so I hand it to the code and let the code carry it.

It is a good time to be doing this, and I am glad the work can find people who want it. But it still goes up on my walls first, where I can live with it long enough to work out which parts I meant.

Prints

Because the work is vector, it prints sharp at any size. Prints of minted iterations are available on request. About prints