Printmaking, conceptual and installation art
Average Cinema is a color-field series which takes iconic motion pictures and renders each frame to its average color. Shown without sound, these pieces reveal the color and light choices that the director and cinematographer made to underlie the story and action of their film. Click here to go to the Vimeo channel for Average Cinema
This project works with scaling, pixellation and pattern recognition, using a true-color images of the Earth as a basis. How much data is needed for the human eye to recognize familiar shapes? What happens when the information grid is restricted in extent? What is the ur-color of the Earth, the continents, the seas? This first
The Swadesh list is a group of words devised by Morris Swadesh as a way to track glottochronology, or how languages change over time. It’s also a useful basic vocabulary, and something of an odd little poem of the human world. I’ve been working with the Swadesh list for a while now, incorporating it into
The ETG definition is a way for very small graphic images to be transmitted by the 140-character Twitter text message. There are several blog posts that describe the development of this standard. Here are three infographics that describe the standard and its use with single-image 2-bit grayscale and 4-bit CGA graphics, and a 3×3 tiled
These pieces are basically in-jokes, amusing little puzzles that reward the mathematically-oriented. First, the “Square Inch” pieces, in which the total area of the printed black circles equals that of the title, even thought they’re not square, not contiguous, and (mostly) not filled. The second set consist of geometric shapes that all have the same
In the early Teens I was interested to find the 2D barcodes known as QR codes popping up on billboards and other advertising. Working at an advertising agency at the time, it amused me that most people under 45 thought of QR codes as essentially useless in American consumer culture, but all the older creatives
These are self-portraits I created using the grayscale values of Gothic 13 foam letters purchased from a Michael’s craft store. The base grid is 23×23, which (given the general proportion of text characters) yields a final proportion of 1.4:1. One is pure grayscale, two are duotones, and one is a tritone.
These pieces simulate the pattern of lines and voids used to encode the standard UPC barcode, using the object itself to represent the barcode needed to purchase that object.
These are sculptures created using 1-inch cubes to create a 3D relief map of the river courses of three major rivers, the Nile, the Yangtze and the Mississippi. They are approximately 24″ x 36″ x 8″.
Skygrids are time-based pixellation of the zenith sky over the course of several days. Each row is a single day, with each pixel representing the average color of the sky taken at specific intervals from sunup to sundown. The first day is at the top of the composite; the last day is at the bottom.