Chaosmosis Stills

3. Why an Algorithm ?

  These art works are based on the idea of using an algorithm which integrates the worldview of contemporary philosophical and scientifical thought.

Indeed, this work integrates chaos theory, stochastic morphogenesis, the theory of communicative action outside of the subject-centered- reason, and the rhyzome as paradigm instead of the grid.

This text illustrates how the integration of contemporary vanguard thought has always been the purpose of truly contemporary art throughout history. Further, the emotional side of the works has to rest on firm ground in order to last.

The Renaissance, which is considered to be the beginning of modern western art, arose also because of Brunelleschi’s mathematical formulation of the linear perspective.

Using an algorithm to get a satisfying representation of reality (i.e. one that includes all the contemporary discoveries both in science and philosophy), is not that new when one thinks about music or architecture.

The Renaissance was also the very beginning of the modern western civilization which saw the birth of the philosophy of the subject -centered -reason and of the objective sciences. It is then no wonder that painting had to keep apace by integrating the new world views of its time through procedures similar in their rigor.

The artists of the Renaissance were far from representing technological inventions or discoveries in the modern sciences, but instead, they embodied them. Leonardo was paradigmatic in his separation of both fields of investigation, like Dürer’s usage of ‘machines’ to draw or copy reality, though he never mixed them with or inside his art work.

The completion of the camera obscura, later widely used by Vermeer, posed the first steps towards the invention of the modern camera.

Much later, when photography was discovered, it was very interesting to see how much it affected the work of such painters as Degas or Monet. Degas’ use of chiaroscuro in his monotypes and challenging cropped images depicted by pastels and Monet’s work on the impact of light or of its changes in order to generate the picture were brought to light by photography’s influences. 

When cinema was invented it generated another challenge. The emergence of cubism and futurism offered responses to moving images through the representation of different spaces and times in cubist painting and movement in futurist painting. It was moreover greatly influenced by the latest discoveries in physics about relativity, the fourth dimension and quantum mechanics , which opened up previously unthinkable new vistas to the world. 

That Duchamp was so well informed about all of this ( a fervent reader of Poincaré ...) is no wonder. It was only natural for him to embody all those new challenges in his life long work.

The next step was when T.V. became the new window to the world. There, we can indubitably set the example of Pollock and abstract expressionism which is a response to the way moving images are exposed not only all over the screen, but also all over the world. Here the idea of action is a humane counterpoise to the cold technological device, the rapidity and instantaneity of painting and dripping, and mimicks the instantaneity of broadcasting.

With video and the birth of the computers, Conceptual art and installations based mostly on photos arose. Cybernetics pushed art in the direction of the what/ why rather than the how as shown by Kosuth.

Now that we are facing a system of communication that for the first time has no center and doesn’t work from one to all but from all to all, a system being nodal instead of a grid, unachievable rather than achievable, heterogenous rather than uniform, interactive rather than just usable, fragmented rather than total, etc. We have to imagine a new art, which can meet those challenges. We have to invent an all embracing art which will not only take into account the new progresses of technology or science, but will also critique them, now that we know( since Hiroshima) that science rarely leads to improve comfort.

 I have tried to embody all those challenges in my work. Or rather should I say, it happened that I was naturally drawn to use them as method and algorithm.

My art is typically made in a manner parallel to nature, as order arising out of chaos. A Template4 was drawn on chaos, using a system devised in a random way, without any conscious or unconscious decisions, by deriving curves and angles from random numbers which parallels the digital images of computer technologies. From this template, which presents itself as a web or net, decisions were randomly taken regarding the direction to follow in order to draw the shapes.

With the shapes and forms, there is never a determinate state for any group of painting, sculpture or drawing. The work is completely open and in a state of incompleteness , which requires the intervention of the beholder. By downplaying the artist as egoistic creator the prospect of going toward a situation of trans-subjectivity where there is no more things such as subject and object, is made possible.

The language used is itself an embodiment of this latter attempt inasmuch as it places the emphasis on paratax instead of on syntax. What there is to get is either in each piece or in all, in their interrelationship or even in the gaps between them. Everything is possible.

©Marko Milovanovic 2004