Dialogue with Frieder Nake

[…] I am collecting topics I want to address. Somewhere between Photography and digital image. Distance to the actual image, proximity to its plan and schema. To the algorithm. Between what everyone can see and that which no one knows, or few people, by all means.
The solid form of the white circular ring on a black background and the shrouds of color surrounding it.
Can you tell me, for my own enlightenment, something about your creation process? Where in the relation between photograph and computer image do you see your drawings?

Frieder

About the process: I wrote a program containing the following instructions:

Draw a set amount of ellipses of varying size displaced randomly in an area, whose expanse is not greater than 10 times the size of the radii. Scale the ellipses every split second at a fraction of themselves. Translate the drawn ellipses with varying distances around the center of the center of the canvas. Repeat the process for X seconds.

All the drawings from that series are based on this program. The the process of iteration is what´s important for me. Not in the program itself, but in the refinement of the underlying parameters like number of ellipses, scale and speed of the rotation around the center.
Every time I run the program, I let it generate a couple of drawings and I decide which parameters should be altered. This means that every “final” drawing has gone through hundreds iterations of program code. For every finished computer drawings there were hundreds of predecessors. What I find interesting is the “autonomy” of the software, which can make decisions and thus create results which I cannot anticipate.

I found a text by Manfred Mohr which I will quote here:

Usually, visual artists order their artistic thoughts and intentions from a visual understanding of things. The realization of visual imagination is limited to subjective and personal preferences, leading always to incomplete and imprecise results. The nature of programming leads to a more global and yet detailed view of one´s idea. My research centers on the logical content of an idea and the search for general rules which describe that idea. I write procedures which generate results that are the logical consequences of these complex and multilayered rules. These results are rich with visual surprises beyond anyone´s imagination and preferences, thus reducing the above mentioned psychological incompleteness.

The whole text can be found here:
http://www.minusspace.com/2009/03/manfred-mohr-generative-arbeiten-galerie-lausberg-dusseldorf-germany/

I will quickly try and put this into my own words:
Visual artists try and recreate an idea from their imagination. I don´t do this, instead I “only” define the set of rules by whose interplay the works emerge. Through this process images are created which don´t try to be something they cannot: A direct representation of my visual imagination.

About the relationship between photography and computer image:
I do refer to photography with the term Lichtzeichnungen (the works have a formal closeness to photograms and long exposure photography), but the process is a different one.
You wrote:

Instead, light as an actively painting agent. “painting”? Casting shadows maybe, breaking through slices, through pinholes, slits, rotating things, ascending and descending. In any case iteratively. Moving.

You have spotted the core difference: An active agent as oposed to a passive receptor. The drawings don´t emerge through constant influence of light on a carrier, but are drawn through active instances of a class. This is why I see my work closer to the digital image and call them computer drawings and not digital exposures.

[…]
„Data, sculpture and code“ you cite my website. I refer to the nature of the digital, which forms the basis of all my work.
I use data sets and collect them with the help of (program) code. I can translate them to any medium, be it image, sculpture or installation. The sculptures are created with computer controlled machines an assembled and finished by hand (in more or less equal parts).
I like your observation and differentiation of the phrase “work with programming”. I program, but I am not a programmer. It is not about programming, but about the work of programming as a tool, as an enabler.
There are many thoughts and observations to be found in your text, which are relevant for my work, which I couldn´t have put this way.

Andreas

I am glad I wrote to you on time, even more glad that and how you respond. Thank you.
With your mention of Manfred Mohr and the verbal description what your program does, you delivered a precise idea for the opening. What is unique is that you let chance speak, not as static as what I know or think, and provide it with time.
If I want to get in touch again, I get in touch.

Frieder