Faded City
The work tries to represent a city in the darkness of the night only illuminated by a small light and at the same time the shapes or structures that can be built or make us believe that there are our eyes in the middle of total darkness. The movement of the mouse is the main actor in this work, playing the role of “light” or “eyes” and “illuminating” a series of interconnected lines that simulate the view of buildings and structures of a city. The work is made based on straight lines mostly superimposed on top of each other where several end up connecting and in several cases making L shapes, bending or continuing along until what would be the floor of the work, this inspired by the works of A.Michael Noll in this particular case “Vertical-Horizontal number three” from 1964. The only interaction found in this work is, as mentioned above, the movement of the mouse functioning as a light, the lighting caused by the movement of the mouse gives rise to an effect where the lines are built in groups and thus creating various types of shapes that can be seen or interpreted in many ways.
Technical, aesthetic and conceptual development
My work is based on the works of A. Michael Noll (1939), one of the pioneers of computer art in the 60s along with Frieder Nake and Georg Nees, exploring both computer art, as well as digital art and 3D animation. For the development of my work I had at least 2 inspirations, the obvious and most direct one is Noll but retroactively a second inspiration was Piet Mondrian, a Dutch avant-garde painter. In itself it is a very curious coincidence because in 1964, Noll presented “Computer Composition with Lines”, a computer-made work that imitated Piet Mondrian’s “Composition With Lines”, so well in fact that most people preferred Noll’s digital version over Mondrian’s, even going so far as to believe that the computer-made work was the original.
Justifying my inspiration in these 2 authors, I have to go back to Activity No. 1 that we did in the first quarter using p5js, for that work I chose a work by Mondrian and I came across one of his works that really caught me, in this case the paintings of the city of New York, the way in which with what seem at first glance superimposed colored lines he was able to represent the streets of a city really interested me. Looking at Noll’s works, the one that interested me the most was “Vertical-Horizontal number three” from 1964, since, despite mostly being interconnected lines made on a computer, the only thing that crossed my mind was that I was seeing a fairly large and tall building, which was funny because if Mondrian represented the streets of a city, the author derived from Mondrian in the digital sphere could represent in my imagination the buildings that occupied those streets. My strong point was never abstract art and its interpretation, and although I don’t quite agree with what he says after reading this fragment by José Luis Brea, “For more than one reason we should compare the work of art to that of dreams: it is a production that induces surface formations that express, that roughly translate, an unbalanced state of energies.”, I felt like I was slowly grabbing his hand.
Finishing with the inspirations and going to the technical part, at first I tried to simulate the interconnected and Noll-inspired lines with rects to resemble buildings more, in the end there was no interconnection between each line making them practically look like random rectangles, not to mention the interaction with the mouse, mostly trial and error until I could achieve something that left me satisfied with the things I was able to make work, the bad side of this is that the blur or light of the mouse did not work to add more interactions because in my opinion they were shoehorned into something that didn’t need it. “Computer art can be said with certainty that it has already been abandoned - or even that it has never produced work of real interest -”, at the end of the day and currently one cannot be sure of this quote because if it were not for Noll’s interconnected lines, someone like me perhaps would not have dared to try to represent buildings in digital.
Literature
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https://www.rightclicksave.com/article/the-interview-a-michael-noll
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- BREA, José Luis. (2002). “Breve (y desordenado) antiglosario –o diccionario de tópicos- sobre el arte electrónico” en La era postmedia. Acción comunicativa, prácticas (post)artísticas y dispositivos neomediales. Salamanca: CASA Editorial, pp. 4-8..
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- BREA, José Luis. (2008). “Redefinición de las prácticas artísticas (s. 21)” en El tercer umbral. Estatuto de las prácticas artísticas en la era del capitalismo cultural. Murcia: CENDEAC, pp. 106-113.