Friday, September 29, 2006

Mark Stock: Evolving Technique in Digital Art (9/20/2006)



We had a great presentation from Mark Stock at the MOCHI meeting on Wednesday September 20th 2006. Mark Stock's presentation, Evolving Technique in Digital Art, conveyed a concise and very interesting history of the science & technology-influenced computer art that precedes and informs his creative work. Mark is one of a long line of artist-scientists who create images informed by scientific insight that are at once fantastic, beautiful and revealing of the forces in the universe.

Mark made it obvious through his examples that the artists he presented were largely directly manipulating code to create their art. Only in a couple examples was an off-the-shelf, GUI-based tool used to create the artwork he presented. Instead we heard about scientists or engineers working on the emerging edge of a technology or science, who happen to also have the sense and ability to create works of art.

He played videos, such as one by Golan Levin that showed live interaction between a camera, voice/sound and a projected dynamically interactive image. We saw animations created (conceptually) by Scott Draves with the the Electric Sheep project, wherein everyone who downloads the screen saver helps do the rendering and users vote for their favorites and the system uses genetic algorithms to alter future versions of the "sheep".

His pieces are based on the science of fluid dynamics and they depict manipulated particle systems and interacting sheets of vorticity, amongst other things. He described that many of his pieces contain farcical starting conditions: "You can't create random vorticity - it's unphysical."

When talking about his work, he mentioned that having fast computers is like having apprentices to do your painting for you. Important to his final images is a processor-cycle-intensive open source tool written by Greg Ward-Larson while at Lawrence Berkeley National Labs, called Radiance. This software computes light reflection in the 3D models so finely that his images appear to be of real objects. He brought with him a physical Lightjet print of his "Mesh #3 Iso" image, and it was a pleasure to look at - this was attested to by the number of people that stopped to stare and look deep into it after the talk.

(From Mark's bio:) Mark Stock is a programmer, researcher, and artist who explores the boundary between the real and the unreal as it pertains to fluid dynamics, computer simulation, and visual perception. He has a PhD in Aerospace Engineering from University of Michigan, and now works for a small fluid dynamics research company in California and develops his art in his free time. He has been producing art for seven years and has had work appear in juried exhibitions for five.

Go to Mark Stock's website to find out more.

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