New Painting Series
I’m starting a new painting series.
SUBJECT+EXPERIMENT:
I am going to explore the concept of randomness, specifically by studying the effects of the insertion of noise into production processes and operations, to see what kind of results I might get. There should be noise at the level of decision-making, in the sequence of actions in the painting process.
I wanted to paint random marks on a freshly primed canvas with a paintbrush or a make marks with oil pastel. I would make a few marks per day with random colors and at random locations on the canvas.
The first problem I encountered when designing this project and experiment was the impossibility of the use of purely random choices in my aesthetic choices and how my choices as an artist and “operator” of the “art-production system” could never be truly random unless I used some form of object for generating random values such as a pair of dice.
I’m talking about studying the phenomenon/processes of statistical randomness through an art practice, in my session-to-session experiments with making random choices in my applications of techniques. The choice of techniques could also be randomized or “noise-injected”.
The reason this is tricky is that I am SUPER BIASED. My choices are BIASED. They have so many aspects that are almost predetermined to be a certain way, i.e. are highly correlated, regular, patterned.
I need to design an algorithm for this philosophical study of random behavior in a painting series. It is what I call a Process-Painting. I will generate random values to use in my decision-making process so that the aesthetic and compositional choices I make have true statistical randomness in them, and not heavily correlated, regular data/values/choices that an artist-operator would normally generate.
An algorithm is just a step-by-step sequence/procedure, a finite sequence of rigorous instructions, so this series of paintings is algorithmic art. It is tentatively being called “Noise in The Workspace”, which is the main series, and this first piece will be called “Space Noise Injection” which is the first series-wthin-a-series. The Second will likely be “Randomized Experimental Parameters”. These names are all tentative for now.
UPDATE:
I decided, as a first step, to divide the surface of the painting in a 4 x 4 regular matrix or grid, giving it 12 squares in total. I have 12-sided dice and will choose the sections of the visual field (composition) based on random values between 1 and 12.
I also decided to assign numbers to six different colors that I will be using, chosen by throwing 6-sided dice. The result for each new mark will be to roll two dice, the 12-sided dice to select the “segment” of the painting to work on, and a 6-sided dice to chose the color of oil pastel to use.
The first segment/location on the grid that I rolled with the 12-sided dice was a 6. I then rolled a 1 with the 6-sided dice, meaning that my first mark on the new painting was in segment 6 with color 1, or black oil pastel.
Here is the result thus far of rolling the set of two dice 32 times, in an iterative fashion, and putting the corresponding different-colored marks in the different segments/locations on the matrix/grid. You can already see that some squares have more marks “landing” on them than others, while some squares have little or no marks whatsoever. This is the product of a random process, the rolling of the dice to choose the given “values”, guiding my artistic choices in the production process.
FINAL UPDATE:
This is the finished product for now, with added “edges” (lines) between the different “nodes” (squares). I also touched up the photograph a little bit digitally, to make it more uniform and nice.
I was inspired to do this experiment after reading about reinforcement learning and exploration in a paper by OpenAI called “Parameter Space Noise for Exploration”. They “inject” noise into the parameter space to get better results from their algorithms. I wanted to “inject” noise into the painting process, so I designed this experiment with rolling dice to choose where to put “marks” on a canvas. I called it “Space Noise Injection”, and it is as I said a series-within-a-series in the new project called “Noise in The Workplace”. I might do one on “Randomized Experimental Parameters”.
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