Andrea Gershuny- Looking Outwards #1

Takahiro Yamaguchi + So Kanno’s “Senseless Drawing Robot”

Kanno and Yamaguchi’s creation is exactly what it sounds like: a robot that creates drawings devoid of any sensory input from its environment. Placed in front of a wall, it rolls back and fourth on four wheels while swinging a can of spray paint on a pendulum. The robot spray paints the wall at random intervals, creating a drawing on the wall.  What I love about this project is that it is a drawing created (mostly) without human input–after its construction and placement in front of a surface, the robot, though it does not know it, is creating art of its own (though, I suppose, Kanno and Yamaguchi own this art by virtue of creating the machine that created it). I like that this drawing’s creator is unaware that it is a creator, and I like that the drawing was born from a random combination of movements rather than the deliberation of a creator. However, I wish that Kanno and Yamaguchi had given the robot more “choice” and made the drawing even more random–for example, they could have had the robot randomly select colors of spray paint and change between colors at random intervals or had the robot randomly select a wall or space to paint on. (That may actually have been the case; it’s not apparent from the video.) I feel like they are so close to achieving art made without human intervention that, had they pushed the more random aspects of this piece and allowed for more possible combinations of placement, color, etc., the piece would have been much more elegant and striking.

Dominik Strzelec’s “Byzantine Geology”

http://www.dataisnature.com/?p=1594

To be completely honest, I have no idea how Strzelec creates these forms. The blog post linked above says that he uses “multiple generative processes… [such as] Belousov–Zhabotinsky reaction simulation coefficients to generate volumetric forms”. As far as I can tell (or as far as I can understand), a Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction is a type of chemical reaction which is not thermodynamically stable and results in oscillating, color-changing liquids. Simulating reactions such as these, Strzelec creates three-dimensional forms with wildly varying, vibrant color schemes that look almost like psychedelic models of the Grand Canyon. In some of his pieces, Strzelec adds a floor underneath these generated forms, turning them from elegant computer-generated forms into “speculative archetecture”, bringing them from the abstract digital space to at least an imitation of the real world. While I do sort of like these forms on their on, as automatic computer-generated imagery, I wish Strzelec had not just stopped at simulating a floor but had pushed these models into real-life sculptures–I can just imagine turning these forms into sculptures, so large that people can walk through them.

Takeshi Murata’s “Pink Dot”

I came across Takeshi Murata’s work on The Creator’s Project blog. Primarily a video artist, Murata has two main branches of his work: mostly hand-drawn animations that rely on computers only to compile the frames, such as his video “Melter 02” below, and videos made using After Effects and other such programs which exploit glitches and flaws in digital video, transforming mundane and mass-produced media into a sublime combination of imagery (both recognizable and abstract), color, and sound. I am absolutely in love with Murata’s work and how it takes things that we perceive as banal or at least ordinary–like film–and crafts it into a sensory experience beyond the video’s intended purpose. My favorite parts of his videos are the ways he uses color, especially the eponymous pink dot in the above video, and how the sound in his videos is somewhat grating, like the video itself, but manages to still create a transcendent aesthetic experience.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6ucn3m7rN8