Red Circle, Black Background / Black Circle, Red Background
A red circle on a black background. Gradually, the background behind it turns red and the circle turns black. Then background turns black and the circle red. This cycle repeats. And that’s it. That’s the art. That’s all folks.
How much can be said about such a simple work?
Well, let’s find out. Join with me if you want to, as I pretentiously ramble a bunch of incoherent gumblediguff about digital art and NFTs.
Why?
OK, let’s start with addressing the directly the question of why did I create this. I am writing soon after the creation of the piece so I have a clear memory of the moment of inspiration.
I’ve recently been minting p5js art works as NFTs on Hic et Nunc. There are two main strategies for publishing a p5js work as an art object. The first and by far the most common and popular approach, is to set the width and height of the canvas to a fixed height and width. Then if the browser window which displays the sketch is increased or decreased in size, the same size is maintained. Most, perhaps all of the available p5js templates for publishing on Hic et Nunc are defined around this particular approach. I think of this as being a ‘fixed size’ approach to the definition of the canvas.
The other strategy could be to redraw the canvas when the window is increased or decreased in size. Making the elements of the artwork relative in size to the display. For example, if you imagine placing a square in the middle of the canvas rather than defining its size as 300 x 300, you would draw it as one third of the available space. So whether the image is displayed at a very small or very large size, the square would always take up one third of the canvas. I think of this strategy as being a ‘relative size’ approach to the definition of the canvas.
The disadvantage of the fixed size approach is if the browser window is smaller than the canvas, the image is obscured and lost at the edges and if the image is displayed very large the piece of art itself would appear as a tiny island in vast potential image space.
The disadvantage of the relative size approach is, well, it’s hard. The artist has to manage the proportions of the available space. With a 2D image of variable dimensions, it is possible for either the width or the height to be the shortest in length and the artwork must respond proportionately to these changes. The artist must manage the canvas and define the artwork to be able to respond efficiently to a change in its dimensional conditions.
Yet the obvious and seductive advantage of the relative size approach is the idea that the same piece of art can be successfully displayed at very small and at vast unimaginably large sizes. That the exact same piece can work on the screen of a mobile phone or take up the entire wall of an art gallery. Now, with the advent NFTs, it has become possible for artists to create digital fine art. What is possible digitally, is now possible in fine art. So, it is now at least theoretically possible for an artist to create a single work flexible enough to display successfully on with a canvas of infinite size.
I have been attempting to create such a work. A truly responsive, relative sized art work which can be displayed on any plane. And up to now, I have largely failed, horribly. The complexity of the elements I found I had to consider, the width and height of the canvas, the width and height of each element in relation to each other and the reasonable limitations of the way a work is displayed when made available on Hic et Nunc (it tends to prefer square works, so a rectangular canvas can present it’s own challenges). I was on the verge of giving up, forgetting the idea as just too hard or difficult for me to do.
Whilst researching for source images to use for another piece (which in itself ended up being Thomas Perks Raising a Spirit to his own Destruction! but that’s another story), I stumbled upon this:
Jiro Yoshihara’s 1965 minimalist painting ‘Red Circle on Black’ from 1965. The key to achieving an artwork of relative size leapt out at me from the work. Minimalism could unlock the challenge of painting for a canvas of infinite size. By having fewer elements to manage, it was possible to focus on the technical challenge of an infinite canvas.
An artwork which can achieve its affect with a single shape can be displayed at relative size with relative ease. I have to thank Jiro, not only for inspiring this minimalist approach but also for suggesting the powerful color scheme. Black and red are meant to be together.
I am fairly confident the work can be successfully displayed at both very small and ridiculously large sizes.
But why did you want to do that?
I don’t know really, why does anyone want to do anything?
One of the first things one learns when starting out with digital images and by that I mean images which are created with the intention of being displayed on a screen, as opposed to printed onto paper or something, is that one does not have control over the size at which the viewer displays your image. As digital artists, we either behave as though we have some level of control and create images at some particular pixels per inch, meaning that there is a maximum screen size at which the image can possibly look good. Or we can use mathematically defined shapes typically called vectors, which by virtue of their numbery nature, can scale to demand the pixels they need at larger sizes. The vector though, whilst very definitely an existing part of digital design, has never really become the predominant mode by which we express our art. Even now, when people talk about NFTs they often mean jpg, gif and png formats (some even jokingly refer to NFTs as jpegs) all of which are defined at some particular amount of pixels in size and so have a breaking point at some larger size where the image will decay and lose its fidelity. We haven’t moved to defining images mathematically on the whole, as we haven’t really needed to. We haven’t had the pressure before to really make the change.
Most digital art up to now has been produced commercially for a purpose, limited in time. It has been produced for images on websites, for advertising campaigns all of which have been temporary, contexts which mean the image will be eventually replaced. Longetivity has not really been a key concern as there hasn’t really been a concept of digital fine art, until now. We haven’t conceived of, thought about or felt the need for digital artworks which might last and remain as relevant to human culture as the Venus De Milo, which has lasted for over two thousand years of human history. Now we must. With the advent of NFTs, we are in the midst of a Renaissance. For the first time in human history, we have a market, community and a nascent industry focussed on the digital fine arts.
So today’s digital artists especially those who wish produce and market fine art goods, have a challenge to meet. Perhaps we have already produced the digital equivalent of the Mona Lisa or the Venus De Milo, but it is more likely we have produced commodoties which over the coming centuries will become obsolete. There is a pressure and challenge to understand, define and control the form of digital artworks with the same depth of knowledge and mastery of our the materials, as the sculpter or the painter.
This is the kind of challenge which with this piece and the failures which came before it, I attempted to address. Maybe I’m thinking about a sort of digital formalism.
Digital formalism, what’s that?
If we’re to talk about digital formalism, it’d handy to define what we mean by by formalism first.
Formalism was a mode of criticism and also a way for artists to approach their work. It emerged during the nineteenth century, but was particularly important in the first half of the twentieth century. In the strongest terms, a formalist holds that the value of an artwork is found in its composition, the color, lines, paints used and its, well, in its form. To the formalist, the form of the artwork is really important, perhaps even the most important aesthetic element. As opposed to say its success at figuratively portraying a particular person, animal or object or the emotions it evokes. L’art pour l’art (art for art’s sake) was a slogan used by and associated with artists with formalist tendencies.
The art critic Clement Greenberg puts it rather well when he wrote:
Picasso, Braque, Mondrian, Miró, Kandinsky, Brancusi, even Klee, Matisse and Cézanne derive their chief inspiration from the medium they work in. The excitement of their art seems to lie most of all in its pure preoccupation with the invention and arrangement of spaces, surfaces, colours, etc., to the exclusion of whatever is not necessarily implicated in these factors.
But it is not just in painting. All styles of art can be analysed or created with a focus on the technical concerns of the particular medium. In film one might look at the lighting, framing, editing, the quality of the film stock used or the digital image capture. Indeed a previous use of the phrase ‘digital formalism’ relates to a research project and study of the formalist films of Dziga Vertov.
One of the fascinating challenges for a formalist approach to digital fine art objects is the way in which the digital absorbs and project the properties of almost all previous art forms. All of the formal concerns for film, video, photography and some of those for painting can be relevant for digital art, as the object can digitise or imitate charateristics of all these previous forms. In 3D art, even the material concerns of sculpture can become relevant. This will become even more true in the future, when fine art objects are produced for and experienced within an immersive metaverse.
Formalist approaches to art allowed for and perhaps even encouraged abstract works. If the art object itself is the subject of the piece, then it doesn’t need to express or portray anything of the outside world.
As can be demonstrated from this review of the Fergus McCaffrey gallery’s 2019 exhibition The Persistence of Form in The Art Of Jiro Yoshihara, the minimalist artwork can invite, provoke or even encourage considerations of form. The exhibition included 20 of Jiro’s paintings, the majority of which were circles painted with one or two brushstrokes.
No two circle paintings in this exhibition are the same — not even close. Divergence is achieved through a number of techniques. Some circles are painted with acrylics, some with oils, and others with watercolors. The range of textures created by the different mediums is alone something to contemplate. The different translucency is also worth considering, as is the multiplicity of effects caused by the type of surface Jiro used — paper yields under the weight of even the gentlest medium, while canvas offers its full support.
When the work is simple, the form, the medium can be brought clearly into view. This affect is one of the triumphs of formalism which a minimalist approach can achieve.
If a painting having been created on paper or canvas, or with acryllic, oil or watercolour can become meaningful aesthetic contemplations for a physical artwork, what are the equivalent considerations for a digital work?
Does the decision to mint an NFT as a jpeg or a png affect the aesthetics? Or whether we create with Photoshop, After Effects or GIMP? What are our equivalent decisions like those the painter who chooses between acryllic or oil paints?
In the case of Red Circle, Black Background / Black Circle, Red Background the decision whether to mint as a gif, an mpeg or maintaining the javascript rendering is profoundly important. Capturing the loop in a file format such as a gif for example, would lose the quality of a work which can scale. The file format in which a digital artist decides to mint their work is profound decision, which decides and can limit the possibililities of the object.
So, are you a Digital Formalist then?
No, I am not a digital formalist. I am first and foremost a bearist. Bearism being a sort of discordian approach to creating art. As a bearist, I can adopt or abandon the beliefs of a particular set of aesthetic principles whenever I wish. In this case, I had an itch I wanted to scratch; the conceptual problem of a truly responsive artwork which can scale to fit any canvas was bugging me. Formalism and minimalism as approaches gave me the intellectual tools to focus on the technical aspects of the problem.
Technical Characteristics
Red Circle, Black Background / Black Circle, Red Background uses two colors. Black (#000000) and red (#FF0000). The red is the primary color red, I did consider using other reds, but the boldness of this red on black was the most visually striking and as soon as I placed this red on the canvas, I knew it was the right choice.
The piece is created in HTML, Javascript and p5js. p5js does not render vectors but uses the instructions in the code to paint bitmaps of pixels. The scaling affect is achieved by re-painting the entire canvas when the canvas size is changed. The only state maintained when re-sized is whether or not the change in progress at the time of the resize is whether the piece was a red to black or a black to red cycle. After the canvas has been redrawn the current cycle will begin again from the top of the image.
It is made available as an edition of 8 on Hic Et Nunc and is available here.
