Category: Art
I’m just about finished with my first series of GIMP art images, made with GIMP version 2.6 for Ubuntu Linux 12.04. Using only the filters which come loaded with the program, I apply different filters and settings intuitively until I am satisfied with each image. It is very much exploratory, obsessive and satisfying work.
I started this series with a single image downloaded from some Google Image search – don’t remember what I searched for. This is what I usually do now. Maybe I feel like looking at images of furniture or living rooms, or maybe it’s Craigslist pictures. I find an image and begin to work on it.
Here’s y8vis1t5l6tn5jrg:
I turned it after a while into this:
I’m not really satisfied with this image any more, but I liked a lot of the shapes I was seeing at high magnification, so I grabbed 30 or so screenshots from it to work with as a series. I’ve produce about 20 finished works and I think the series is done.
Here’s Numbers 10, 20 and 4, with HQ closeups:
I’ll be posting more. If you like them, let me know. I may be uploading them for sale soon.
Sometimes an image just captures the eye and I have to do something with it. An image of the newly emerging SARS Coronavirus from a BBC article this week looked beautiful to me, so I googled and found a larger image of it to work with:
After the continuous application and reapplication of filters, I turned it into what you see below. The full resolution image is very large, so I have a low-res version of the whole image along with some screenshots of the work at full resolution so you may see the details.
I’ve begun learning a programming language again. This time its Processing, and I’m finally getting serious about it. I just received a copy of Matt Pearson’s Genarative Art last month, but I’m working through the examples in Generative Design: Visualize, Program and Create with Processing by Hartmut Bohnacker, Benedikt Gross, Julia Laub and Claudius Lazzeroni first.
These self-portraits were the result of applying sketch P_4_3_2_01 (with text and character attributes tweaked a bit in the code) to a profile picture of mine. As the process used was typographic, and this is a self-portrait, I used my first name as the text to be repeated. The shapes of the large letters, stacked into elongated cylinders, distort the features and colors of my face into strangely evocative curves and knives. The images captured from the processing session were then enlarged and passed through many filters until they came out as they have.
I haven’t learned enough to really create my own generative art / digital poetry code, but tweaking other people’s code has always been the best way for me to figure out what’s going on in the code. I’ll keep plugging away, and coding my heart out.
Enjoy!
Note: They look better at full size, so click on them to view them at 100%.
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Here is more art created with GIMP. It seems that it doesn’t particularly matter what image I begin with; the processes tend to create similar effects, colors and objects as I go along. I’m starting to branch out from only the visual by working with images of words cut out of a PDF. “end” is my first experiment in this kind of text art, which is less similar to working on concrete poetry that I thought it would be.
Note: These images have been reduced in quality and size for ease of upload and web viewing.
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I’ve started to watch episodes of Art21 on Hulu Plus now through my PS3. Seems you can watch all of the episodes on the PBS Art21 website. I’ve always been fascinated with all kinds of art: music, visual art, literature, dance, film. I’ve also liked to listen to interviews with artists, which I often find much more stimulating than interviews with writers. They usually seem so much more passionate, intense, and wrapped up in what they’re talking about, what they’re working on. It’s this mentality I would like to bring to my poetry, to my projects and what I am doing with language. Some of my favorite poets sound more like abstract visual artists describing a display than writers talking about a poem or the situation that it arose from. Writers like Jackson Mac Low, bpNichol, Gertrude Stein, Leslie Scalapino and Christian Bök that continue to engage my curiosity and respect after repeat engagements with their work and thought. It is not really so much an idea of an avant garde that I want to connect with. Instead, there is a curiosity and openness to their work that is constantly (constantly did) re-emerg(e)ing throughout their careers, a necessity to change the approach, the materials, the aesthetic of their projects as new focal points emerged. And the concepts, perspectives, states of mind, spaces that their works engage with and recreate for readers are a pleasure am undeniably thankful for. This is how I would like my past present and future works to be. If there is a poembassy to bomb, it is in my mind, and I will continue to build it up, blow it up, and build it back. Or maybe stretch out a bit in its hollow shell and look around.