WINDING NUMBERS #01 |
WINDING NUMBERS #02 |
| TITLE: | Winding Numbers |
| DATE: | January 2011 |
| SIZE: | 8 x 8 inches |
| MATERIALS: | Acrylic and photographic dye on cotton |
Winding Numbers are paintings presented in the conventional two-dimensional format, but they are not two-dimensional artworks.
The explanation starts on 11th September 2001, when I posted the article Psycho, having been moved by the work of Saul Bass on the film titles, with the stark lateral dislocations / slippages / glitches. Some years later a documentary on his work explained that the effects were acheived in a very low-tech way: I forget the precise details, but either wooden planks or sheet metal strips were laid down on the floor, abutting one other, forming a flat surface, upon which the titles were drawn in white paint. Then, filming inside a pitch-black warehouse, the painted sheets were physically shifted from side-to-side, creating the glitch effect, as only the white lettering showed up.
This story of how Saul Bass acheived his desired effect with limited technology stuck with me, because I have for some time had a love-hate relationship with digital art. After four years or so of using purely digital processes, I started looking at traditional media (for want of a better term). I still wanted to convey the glitch aesthetic, but with some of the visceral qualities that I felt were missing from digital media. Plus I wanted to have more fun, and get my hands dirty. The screenprints, paintings and photographic exposures from computer monitors were all motivated by this aim.
Moving on to 2006, the Death Star photographic prints posed the following question (though never stated explicitly):
Images stored in a computer are represented by a one-dimensional stream of data; but what happens when the conversion from one dimension to two dimensions isn't synchronised with the data?
The resulting de-synchronisation (contrived by having a human turn a rotating drum whilst a computer projects data at a constant rate onto it) resulted in the expected lateral slippages. This experiment was satisfactory as far as proving the concept, but not from an art point of view. Too much technology was being used to express a simple idea, and it was a very rigid mechanical setup, making variations cumbersome to explore.
Winding Numbers represents the next logical step following on from Death Star. Here, the substrate is a one-dimensional strip of material. The art is therefore a one-dimensional data stream, in which all synchronisation cues between the data and the two-dimensional rendering surface are absent. Thus, any two-dimensional rendering of the data is merely one of infinitely many possible choices.
In the example renderings displayed above, the data was wound around an 8 inch square frame. This actually creates a pair of images, front and back. Therefore the size of the rendering surface and which side to display are two decisions which have to be made. In future works, these choices will possibly be left open.