Deterritorialized
Creating the postmodern with depict artist Heath West
This week I sat down to talk with Heath West about his piece “12:00PM, 030314”, one of my personal favorite pieces we have on depict. Heath focuses on the structure and transformation of space, exploring how our environments may be composed as a series of points (centers) and lines (trajectories) that fold reflectively into the practice of everyday life. Our conversation about the work took us from algorithms to urban landscapes, and from architecture to comic books. I had to dust off a lot of my old lit. crit. books to keep up. The first thing I asked Heath when we sat down was, as usual “What’s going on in this work?”
Heath: What’s going on? An explosion of color, a cloud striated in a rhythm of its inversion. The contrasting gradients weave together a nebulous space, a picture structured, regulated, and balanced by opposing hues and saturations. A philosophical reading of the spatial play of opposites was described by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in 1440: The Smooth and The Striated, where “What interests us in operations of striation and smoothing are precisely the passages or combinations: how the forces at work within space continually striate it, and how in the course of its striation it develops other forces and emits new smooth spaces.”
Ben: Interesting… [At this point I was definitely playing for time, and trying to think of something equally smart to say back]
Heath:…
Ben:…So…when I look at this a few things come to mind. Firstly, a powerful sense of dynamism and speed, but as I look at it more some shapes that seem recognizable. It could be a skydiver’s eye view rushing down on a cityscape, or something more organic. Is your work based on real-world items or images, or is this just my brain playing tricks on me?
Heath: It’s a good thing for your brain to play tricks on you! This means that the picture is causing you to see deeper; feel deeper. Some projects start with a photograph I take, usually of flowers, trees, or landscapes (because I think they’re beautiful), and I use the RGB pixel data of the digital photo as the base material. However, this particular image began with a color field output from an application created in openframeworks, but it didn’t stop there. I continued to use various other codes and applications to get the effect (the stopping point) which you mentioned; a “sense” of something. If the picture can produce a sensation in the viewer (of dynamism, of speed, of an explosion, of a cloud), then I believe the picture has accomplished its goal.
Ben: That makes sense. I’m sure Deleuze and Guattari would be happy to know that the art is taking place in my head [saying this made me feel slightly cleverer]. It’s interesting that you talk about starting from a reference image, and then applying code and programs to get to the “stopping point”. A lot of “algorithmically generated art” that we see today mirrors organic, fractal processes, in that it proceeds from nothing based on a set of rules. I’d be interested to know how it’s different applying software and rules to an existing image. Any interesting experiments, or strange results that you encountered along the way?
Heath: I learned a lot of rule-based algorithms in architecture school, much of which gave fairly predictable results (such as voronoi patterns, honeycomb structures, etc.). What I’m working with now is not rule-based — even though the code needs a logic to operate — but functions instead by extracting RGB color data from the given image injected into the application (some apps create an image from nothing, some create a new image from an image you feed it).
These functions produce a live application where it’s possible to control the picture with the mouse and some key entries. From the live application, I’ll eventually reach a point where I feel the picture has a compositional-philosophical balance. If not, I’ll start over. The most exciting part of this process is to see what the code does with the extracted RGB color data—and here we can return to Deleuze and Guattari with their concept of “deterritorialization”. In his interviews with Claire Parnet, Deleuze describes what they meant by deterritorialization as something or someone being “outlandish”, and if something is outlandish, it’s unconventional or unpredictable. Working with code in this way produces some outlandish results, indeed! Some totally strange and completely fascinating color combinations result. They aren’t necessarily what I want my art to do, but they certainly are incredibly fun results to work with, especially once they’re under control and heading in the right direction.
Ben: You mentioned you went to architecture school. Do you see yourself as an architect or an artist first? Do you think the difference is harder to define in the digital world?
Heath: Without a doubt I see myself as an artist first. My interest in architecture developed from art history. While my degrees are in architecture, I’ve studied studio art and art history since high school. One of the highlights of my education was taking a course with the American art critic Rosalind Krauss, whose writing has been formative in my reading of art (and architecture). I began to push my art forward while I was working at a terribly boring architecture office in Berkeley, California. I was supposed to be working on a competition with a friend, but when that fell through, I decided that I needed to do what I really wanted to do, and it didn’t involve architecture. There is a vast difference between the practices of art and architecture, especially in our digital world. I agree with Le Corbusier, who stated that an architect needs another form of creative output, other than architecture (he painted), as the two fields of practice are completely separate, and one can go mad from only focusing on architecture all of the time.
Ben: Have you read Asterios Polyp? It’s graphic novel; a great exploration of the rational versus the irrational in art and architecture. Asterios is something of a misnomer, an architect and teacher whose work, whilst celebrated in design, has never been translated into a building or structure. Would you say that makes him an artist of an architect?
Heath: I haven’t read that book, but the idea seems very close to that of the late Lebbeus Woods, whose work I love. Woods was an architect and educator, and many of his visionary designs were never built (except for one that he did with Steven Holl), but they were celebrated in art museum exhibitions. Woods’ project was architectural, social, urban, and political. And because of this, he was architect, not an artist. His spaces were amazing—so amazing that they crossed the threshold into “something other” than architecture—and because of how visually striking his work was, by default, this meant his work also became art. Some architects only make architecture (some only make dumb buildings), but others take their work into the realm of art. Woods was definitely of the latter.
Ben: For those of you who don’t know Lebbeus Woods, his work is amazing. He’s been influential in the world of architecture, but also in the mainstream, as an inspiration for many imagined sci-fi and gaming worlds. I guess there’s building in the real world and building on paper. The postmodernists you’ve quoted imply that there’s another, far more fertile ground for building. Can you tell me how you approach building the impressions you spoke about in the mind of the people who experience your art?
Heath: My approach is intuitive. Whether the starting point is a photo or a pixelated color field, the process is always from instinct. Do I see something that’s emotionally responsive in what I’m trying to achieve in my work? If there’s no emotional gut reaction, then just forget it. Start over. I can’t predict what others will feel, but I know what I feel when I see it. Of course I would like the viewers to feel what I do—something emotional, philosophical—a sensation that the written language cannot describe. And when I’m working, when I see that the picture has developed into an summation of all my goals, I stop.
Ben: Thanks so much for taking the time, this has been a lot of fun. It’s definitely been a conceptual learning process for me, and I appreciate the detail you’ve gone into in answering the questions. If there’s anything you’d like let me know, otherwise we can sign off here.
Heath: You bet, thanks for talking with me! I don’t have anything else to include, other than that more details and work can be found on my website http://heathwest.net/.
Heath West is a featured artist on depict. You can sign up for depict and purchase ‘12:00PM, 030314' at depict.com.
