The grARTphicator

DESCRIPTION

Modern technologies now allow art to exist in forms that were once out of the question or beyond prior physical capabilities. In contemporary New Media art, the computer-generated image is the bridge between what is imagined and what can be achieved. Advancements in the expression of art forms can now generate results within seconds, broadening the scope of the artist’s original creation. The outcome: unexpected, new work that consistently challenges one’s artistic sense. With this kind of creative freedom that goes beyond the human mind, technology-based art opens up a whole new world from conventional perspective, composition and symmetry.

However, an ambiguity arises: is art being created, or is a formula being executed? Avant-garde filmmaker Stan Brakhage once exclaimed, “imagine a world before the ‘beginning was the word.’ ” In his opening to Metaphors On Vision: “How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of ‘Green’?” Brakhage believes that a new way of seeing should emerge from an untrained visual perception, not unlike that belonging to an innocent child.

the grARTphicator explores this relationship by its attempt to de-digitize the New Media art form, bringing computer interface and on-screen practice back to its pure roots of the days of Pencil on Paper. The piece lets the audience interact with it, as they are invited to draw according to given rules. Participants become artists, as they experience the process of creating an image, collectively as a machine. The grARTphicator is a setup of drawing the image within a calculated environment – using an artistic tool: the colored pencil, but its component: graph paper with an equation they are given.

What happens in this relationship? Are you creating art, or are you following a rule that creates your art? It is precisely the spirit of this distance, this journey and this transformation that this piece is trying to capture.