INDUSTRIAL REVERIE: CHAOS AND DECAY
The painting’s interplay of roughened metal and chaotic brushstrokes invites reflection on impermanence and decay. Jagged edges and rust spots suggest time’s relentless erosion of even the most durable materials. The industrial color scheme alludes to human endeavors, highlighting the unyielding spirit of creation amidst the inevitability of entropy. The contrasting dark shadows and lighter flecks create a visual narrative that reminds us of the fleeting beauty and moments of clarity within the harshness of existence.
The asymmetrical composition captures the inherent imbalance of the universe, reflecting the tension within the human condition. Movement, both literal and metaphorical, is conveyed through dynamic brushstrokes, representing the turbulence and restlessness of thought and emotion. Chaos in the painting symbolizes the unknown and uncontrollable aspects of life. The depth and texture draw the observer into a contemplative space, where isolation prompts introspection and unease becomes a pathway to deeper understanding.
A friend of mine, upon seeing the abstract digital painting presented above, said, “Rust, oxidized iron, is one of my favorite colors and textures.” I immediately agreed wholeheartedly that it was one of my favorites too, but then I wondered what it was that people saw when they looked at my digital paintings. Do people see “rust, oxidized iron” or other metals or whatnot, or do they see an “abstract digital painting”?
I ask because I make digital paintings. I don’t do what others call “texture synthesis”, which is usually for the film and video game industries and the like. I did in essence “synthesize” a kind of “texture”, except mine is really just a random arrangement of pixels of different color. It’s not meant to be a texture, but more of an “abstract landscape”.
In that sense, I see myself as a kind of “Impressionist”, in that I go out “in the field” and collect “data”, through my senses or through various other means, and then I work on the finished product in my studio or what I like to call my “laboratory”. I follow the same process for my music and sound design as I do for my abstract digital visual designs. I call it “field art”, and call myself a “field artist”, because I work out “in the field” and I create visual and auditory “fields”, what I often call “noise fields”.
That’s what this abstract digital painting really IS, a noise field or noise field painting. I started with Gaussian noise, with random black and white pixels, and I slowly “modulated” the noise field; I call it “modulation”. I can call it “Impressionistic” insofar as it is an abstract representation of a “landscape”, similar to what an Impressionist painter might do, except it’s an ABSTRACT REPRESENTATION. But it IS based on real experiences out “in the field” as I say, as though I were really painting outside in nature with my easel, canvas, and paints. It’s just done digitally in the lab.
If you “zoomed” into my digital painting above, you would clearly see that it’s just a random arrangement of pixels of different colors. It’s not anything else. In fact, a digital image is ALWAYS made up of pixels. It’s just that I add a lot of randomness to the process, and if I called it an “Industrial Reverie”, I was aware that it resembled a kind of close-up of a rusted piece of metal, though I wasn’t necessarily trying to represent that. I go by “impressions”, i.e. I wanted to give an “impression” of an “Industrial Reverie”.
Impressionism deals with “impressions” which are the “virtual” reflection in relation to physical and concrete reality. It is a “portrait of the landscape”. It is the virtual place of “metamorphoses” and not the space which circumscribes the objects. It is more of a portrait of the effects of light on the landscape and not a pure “Euclidian space” with carefully polished objects in 3D. One of the innovations of the Impressionist painters though, or of painters around that time in general, was going out and painting “in the field”, or what is usually called “en plain air” or “plein-air painting”, as opposed to “studio painting”. Once again, though I “paint” inside the “lab”, I get my experiences from being out in the “plein air”.
I spend much of my days walking around in the neighborhood, appreciating the diverse experiences, the images and sounds. My art is experiential, though it is abstract. “Industrial Reverie: Chaos and Decay” is not meant to represent a single texture, say, of a given piece of rusted metal, but is designed to give rise to all sorts of associations around industrial design, or just everything “industrial”. It is not just one single thing, it is a whole “abstract landscape”. I don’t know how else to put it.
It is a statement on our industrial — or “post-industrial”? — civilization as a whole, again, not just on some singular piece of metal. It is an abstraction. I work with and by abstraction(s). In that regard, the work is “non-representational”, though to me it DOES “represent” something, an abstract experience, at the phenomenological level. That is how I experience “the industrial” as a concept, as a set of objects, of places, of situations, of experiences. Again, the art is experiential, not purely conceptual either.
“Noise Field Paintings” are meant to be appreciated AS noise fields, as random arrangements of pixels with various pixel values. I also work with an iterative, serial, and evolutionary design workflow methodology. For every work of art that I share, I have gone through dozens of iterations. After each significant “modulation”, I save a copy and then move onto the next “modulation”. I am trying to create a certain measure of what I call “visual interestingness” or “VI”. Although these are done “by hand”, that is, in a “manual” way, they could in principle be made via a computational, algorithmic process, BY MACHINE.
The art in that sense IS PROCEDURAL, it’s just that I go through the step-by-step process “manually”. But a computer would have no problem going through the same procedures, except that the measure of “visual interestingness” or “VI” has a subjective element to it. A computer or machine would have to be able to quantify the “VI”, which I argue is doable, it’s just not necessarily easy. For me, the measure or quantity of “VI”, which I use as a “fitness function” to decide when to “terminate” an “evolutionary series” or “generation”, is done in a subjective fashion. I “weigh” it subjectively, using aesthetic judgments or judgments of taste, which again CAN be made via machine, though it’s not that easy, and generally the machine will come up with suboptimal results, or “noise”.
If you are an artist doing something similar to this type of “field art”, or you know of any artists doing so, please reach out to me and tell me about your work, or the work of these artists or designers. I’m interested in seeing what others are doing, and it’s becoming increasingly hard to find new artists using Google Search, as it seems its index has been overwhelmed with so much noise, as there’s so much content out there that is of very poor quality. It seems Google Search is getting worse and worse, in any case. So I’m depending on my readers to some extent to let me know of their work, or the work of others, work that might be relevant to mine. Otherwise, I will just keep doing my work. It’s what I do. I also call it “ambient experimental design”, and I do it both in the visual realm as well as in the realm of audio, with sound design experiments in the laboratory.
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