These works show how richness and complexity can emerge from simple procedures iterated to a massive scale. The potential of the purely computational, the mechanistic, is explored as it approaches the boundary with the natural, the tactile, the 'real'.
The artist is one step removed from the act of creation. Instead of placing each individual colour and shape, the artist forms, adjusts, and curates computational processes, and it is then these processes, scaled sufficiently, that produce the works. Just as the operation of the laws of physics results in the beauty of the sunset, so too a simpler - but perhaps resonant - aesthetic can be found through this approach.
Central to this programme is the notion of the oversized pixel, rastered onto the image plane, as the end result of a process displayed as a colour. The essential digital (mathematically the discrete) nature of the medium is thus emphasized and celebrated, instead of covered up and forced to mimic non-digital media (for example using anti-aliasing).
A method predominantly used as a basis here is to define colours as 'genetic sequences', realised digitally as a string of 1s and 0s, and then expressed as the usual RGB triple. Because of this representation, colours can be mutated and crossed with each other within the computer to form new variations.
Each series investigates a different combination of techniques. The pieces are randomly seeded, and are a unique result from the process they express. They are titled by their 'Unix timestamp' - the exact time of creation recorded as the number of milliseconds since 00:00:00 UTC 1st January 1970.
Robert Allison
2018
All images © Robert Allison 2018
The artist is one step removed from the act of creation. Instead of placing each individual colour and shape, the artist forms, adjusts, and curates computational processes, and it is then these processes, scaled sufficiently, that produce the works. Just as the operation of the laws of physics results in the beauty of the sunset, so too a simpler - but perhaps resonant - aesthetic can be found through this approach.
Central to this programme is the notion of the oversized pixel, rastered onto the image plane, as the end result of a process displayed as a colour. The essential digital (mathematically the discrete) nature of the medium is thus emphasized and celebrated, instead of covered up and forced to mimic non-digital media (for example using anti-aliasing).
A method predominantly used as a basis here is to define colours as 'genetic sequences', realised digitally as a string of 1s and 0s, and then expressed as the usual RGB triple. Because of this representation, colours can be mutated and crossed with each other within the computer to form new variations.
Each series investigates a different combination of techniques. The pieces are randomly seeded, and are a unique result from the process they express. They are titled by their 'Unix timestamp' - the exact time of creation recorded as the number of milliseconds since 00:00:00 UTC 1st January 1970.
Robert Allison
2018
All images © Robert Allison 2018
