Leave No Trace » Aaron Koblin

Flight Patterns revisited

Alec — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 08:33:23 +0000

I’ve mentioned Aaron Koblin’s Flight Patterns a couple of times already on this blog (here and here), and it was mentioned again by Create Digital Motion because of the disruption of air travel by the erupting Icelandic volcano. The reason I bring it up again is that I read an interview with Aaron, one of three interviews on the Processing wiki.

I like Processing, and enjoy my dabblings with it, but it’s much more interesting hearing how artists use it as a tool to achieve so much more. (See also the interviews with artists in ‘Processing’ by Casey Reas and Ben Fry.)

Flights of Fantasy

Alec — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 05:15:52 +0000

Decode: Digital Design Sensations, the forthcoming exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, looks interesting. Aaron Koblin’s Flight Patterns appears to be included, which I saw and liked in this year’s Manchester International Festival. (The online version is different from the installation version, so the emphasis is different.)

Generative art

Alec — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 07:01:47 +0000

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been gathering some links to various articles that have caught my eye and that may or may not be relevant to this blog. There’s an article on The Guardian’s website that introduces some elementary examples of digital art practices, then raises some interesting questions but frustratingly doesn’t even start to discuss them.

With painters and photographers we more or less know the provenance. But who should get the credit for art produced by algorithms or random means? The software program, the programmer, the computer or the person who pressed the button to start the program, or whoever had the original idea? Does the fact that you can endlessly change what you paint with Brushes make it any less a work of art than a traditional painting, which may have had lots of layers added before the artist was satisfied? Maybe, as Oscar Wilde said, art never expresses anything but itself.

I realise that this article was written for the printed version of the newspaper, but it’s crying out for links to examples of the art being discussed. How about the Gallery of Complexification? Is generative art like this really art? Or is it just pretty pictures? Brian Eno, talented all-rounder that he is, is a hero of mine, but I’m sure he wouldn’t describe himself as a Fine Artist. What does that mean for his 77 million paintings? Does there have to be a concept behind the work, like Aaron Koblins’s Flight Patterns?