Fractalry – Impermanent – at Concerning Matter June 2014
In the past six months I began working with 3 dimensional fractals. This work has evolved into a multi-media music piece with accompanying music entitled Enclosure. Each piece is a named after a component of a personal residence (i.e. Garden, Entrance, Porch, Oriel, etc), and includes an accompanying fractal-based video, drafts of which can be seen here.
In understanding the premise of Concerning Matter, in particular this statement in the show’s premise “Not disheartened by the pervasiveness of the physical, the artists in Concerning Matter are invigorated by what we have in front of us—what we can hold in our hands and explore with our senses.” I focused on the surprise and wonder I experience working with the CGI fractal program. In order to generate a complete journey through a 3D space it is impossible to experience every frame before the program generates the series. It can take as long as 5 minutes per image frame. A complete movie, which can be 60 frames per second can include 10’s of thousands of images. In navigating a journey the only images I see are “keyframes” (maybe 50 per 5 minute piece). Between them is only a guess at what might appear. Fractarly provides an opportunity for the gallery audience to uniquely witness the image, in the moment of its creation, like watching an artist create thousands of paintings and then tear them up, or more exactly evaporate them. Into thin air. The images generated during a Fractalry piece exist only in the moment after they are created, until the next image is generated. The complete Fractalry work includes a web component created by developers based in Kenya that built a unique software component that pushes Fractalry images to the abtechno website abtechno.com/gowanus where viewers can experience the Fractal generation real time.
Complimenting the CGI piece are two pigment print stills from other fractal pieces, representing an opposing force to Imperminence. A rigid still image encased permanently in epoxy resin, challenging, and failing, to permanently hold the image in the material world. They too one day will fade.