Author Archives: brogan

Currently (March 2011) have an exhibition of algorithmic drawing work at the Faculty of Creative Arts Gallery (University of Wollongong). Loom The title of this exhibition is a reference to the Jacquard loom.  Invented in 1801 by Joseph Marie Jacquard, … Continue reading →

This is a short extract from a poem that I wrote in the late 1970s. It demonstrates two basic features of my method that remain relevant today, although I scarcely ever write poetry any more. First, the poem was typed. … Continue reading →

Drawing inspiration from Sol LeWitt’s privileging of drawing concept over the material space of actual drawing, computational art typically focuses on the conceptual logic of the software program rather than the electronic space of program execution. The latter is positioned … Continue reading →

In conceptual art the idea of concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is … Continue reading →

Howard Morphy describes the technique of Eastern and Central Arnhem Land painting: “painting is seen as a process of transforming a surface from a state of dullness to that of shimmering brilliance (bir’yunhamirri)”. (Morphy, H. (1998) Aboriginal Art, Phaidon, London … Continue reading →

When fully developed, technique established the primacy in art of making, in contradistinction to a receptivity of production, however that is conceived. Technique is able to become the opponent of art insofar as art represents – at changing levels – … Continue reading →

[T]he political effectiveness of art ‘does not reside in transmitting messages’, but ‘in the first place consists of dispositions of bodies, the partitioning of singular spaces and times that define ways of being together or apart, in front or at … Continue reading →

Stupid as a painter… Marcel Duchamp What makes the painter stupid? Perhaps it is not only the emphasis on seeing (‘retinal art’), but also upon making. Suspending the poetics of perceptual response and manual craft. Duchamp repositions the art work … Continue reading →

Loom explores aspects of recursive geometric subdivision. Simple shapes are subdivided into further smaller shapes (typically triangles or quadrangles). Applied many times over, complex patterns and textures emerge.  Rather than positioning the computer as a generative creative agent, computational processes … Continue reading →

Art is bound by a paradox. At one level it resists taking definitive shape in space and time. Stepping outside the boundaries of ordinary, prosaic systems of understanding, action and interaction, art suggests a realm of alternative possibility. But at … Continue reading →

In 1995 a group of SIGGRAPH artists formed an informal group, the Algorists. One of their members, Jean-Pierre Hebert, coined the term “algorist” to describe artists who wrote their own algorithms to produce their creative work. The members worked with … Continue reading →

An image from Athanasius Kircher’s Musurgia Universalis (1650) depicts an automatic music machine, a kind of hydraulic organ. The notes are linked to a geared cylinder that is powered via a spinning water wheel. There are three miniature allegorical scenes … Continue reading →

I had always accepted the conventional view that Marx transformed Hegel’s abstract philosophical conception of human progress into a radical instrument of social critique. Marx famously took dialectical idealism and shaped it into dialectical materialism. Yet recently I came across … Continue reading →

Given Hegel’s conception of labour as a human and socially-inclined manifestation of reason, how can machine operations be regarded as a form of labour? They appear instead as a form of dumb, unreflective functioning. The machine, for instance, can have … Continue reading →

In conceptual art the idea of concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a … Continue reading →