Official Declaration of Production-Year 2019–2020
Published in
18 min readJun 23, 2018
I usually make my official declaration every year in the Fall, but as I did last year I am beginning the declaration a little early. Know that this is going to be a document-in-formation. Keep coming back for updates. — A.G.
- This coming Production-Year, this “season” if you will, of 2019–2020, I will be trying to consolidate a project that is in my heart and that I have been working on for a good 20 years, something I call “The Painter’s Almanach”;
- I already have a publication on Medium called The Painter’s Almanach. The idea is to have an almanach like you find in history, but an almanach specific to painters;
- The idea is that the year starts in January and every month you have tips and tricks and so forth of a mature painter, i.e. in the spring you see flowers sprouting everywhere so you go on camera-adventures to take pictures to keep a “stock” of spring pictures to be used any year;
- The idea too is to present the Year the way a painter sees it; Painting having everything to do with the Seasons;
- Another aspect is what I call “Seasons of The Heart”, where it’s the human heart itself that goes through “Seasons”. I honor these seasons by making paintings and composing beautiful music, as well as writing texts to accompany the images and sounds;
- Since I’m a field artist, I’m often “in the field” with all of my equipment, making audio recordings in the field, as well as making sketches, taking photographs, etc., take notes;
- I will leave it at that for now. The date is the 22nd of June, 2018. You will eventually see more of this declaration “below the fold” in coming months.
07:34 2018–06–23
- There are a few other projects that I have been working on for a few years. One of them is the White Point Project, which fundamentally is a wave of experiments having to do with the experience of light and colors. Below is an example of a “textured color”, directly scanned without intervention;
- Another ongoing project is the Théatre Pauvre Project. This is going in line with Jerzy Grotowski’s Vers un Théatre Pauvre. The idea is to have a pure “theater”, with only actors and spectators, taking out all the costumes and props and developing a “naked” or “pure” theater;
- How that plays itself out in my art work and my research is that I am trying to do the same but through Images, Sounds, and Texts, my three main disciplines as an artist.
14:59 2018–06–23
- I’m still working on The History-Project, a you can see above with an example of a recent History-Painting. The History-Painting is a genre that I came up with in the Summer or 2001, when I was living in Montreal;
- I’ve made countless art works in that “Series”/”Collection”. It started with a novel by the name of The History-Project as well as a series of new paintings, when I first moved into the Northcliffe apartment in NDG on the island of Montreal, Quebec (Canada);
- This time I am working on The Archives-Project which is the second part of The History-Project. The History-Project’s premise was that a team of intellectuals were put together to try to figure out why there was MORE anxiety and depression in the Greater Montreal Region than in the rest of Canada. I don’t know if that is even true, it probably isn’t, but it was a believable premise for the novel;
- In truth, in the novel, The History-Project is a failure, and in The Archives-Project the same characters go through the archives of the History-Project to try and understand why and figure out how the project failed;
- All my Projects are serial in nature, and involve series of Images, Sounds, and Text. I make digital music, sound design, as well as just plain old songs on the guitar or piano; The same thing goes for my images, I make digital compositions but also paintings and drawings; Then I write a great deal of text to accompany the music and pictures.
14:46 2018–06–26
- A concept that I have been terribly obsessed with over the last few years is the concept of “visual interestingness”; When I create my digital compositions (visual art), I try to find what is the absolute MINIMUM that I can do as an artist to create visual interestingness;
- The idea in the image above is to use what is called the Diagonal Method; The idea really though is to find what is the minimal intervention possible to achieve visual interestingness; The other idea that lies behind this is that the objective in a lot of these visual experiments is to create an algorithm, i.e. a computer program, that can autonomously generate images with various levels of “visual interestingness”; The ideal is a machine intelligence that creates compelling visual art all on its own;
- In any case, this is something that I will be working on in the coming Production-Year;
- Here we have another visual experiment based on “asymmetry” in the pictorial field; The idea is that humans tend to be afraid of asymmetry, what has been called “asymmetriphobia”; Humans like to “arrange” and “order” things, it’s a form of obsessive-compulsive disorder;
- Since I’ve always been obsessed with noise and noisy images, noisy signals, etc., I am naturally attuned to what I call the “Cosmic Asymmetry”, because I actually believe that cosmic asymmetry is like a fundamental force in physics, it’s the start of any new process, it’s what gets things moving, it is in essence the “Unmoved Mover” in the universe;
- This is also, amongst other things, something that I will be investigating throughout the coming new Production-Year; I want to make more breakthroughs in the fundamental study of signals and noise;
17:14 2018–06–26
- In the coming Production-Year, I will be experimenting a great deal with visuals; I will be making my own visual “tests”, to test various particularities of the human eye;
- I’m interested in liminal cases, I want to work at the psychophysical threshold of sight, and especially of the phenomenon of “visual interestingness”; I want to make images that are the absolute “minimal” example of visual interestingness;
- Here is an example of a scatter plot type “noise field” (as I call them), made by hand, pixel-by-pixel; The distribution is across a diagonal axis, and is a form of dyamic visual equilibrium, in my book; As I played with asymmetry in the previous example, now I am working with what I call “minimal visual interestingness”;
- For my general digital design methodology, see Evolving The Fittest Image..
19:03 2018–06–26
- If you read the work linked above called Evolving The Fittest Image, you now know something about my rigorous design workflow management methodology; I create populations of images and only let the “fittest” images make it to the next generation;
- Here is something I just made, and is indicative of the kinds of works I will be making in this new Production-Year, i.e. forms of evolutionary design;
- I started with pure noise and “evolved” the image to the point that it resembled a kind of “cellular” type organism, a multiplicity of them;
- The idea is to continue in this vein, because the ultimate “objective” if you will, call it “Objective-X” is to create a computer program/algorithm that can autonomously generate what I call “visual interestingness” or “VI”;
- I’ve spent years now whittling down my design methods so that they can be expressed, and performed, in an algorithmic process, i.e. in a finite step-by-step process, i.e. you start with INPUTS, you go through PROCEDURES, and you get OUTPUTS. Then you keep going, you keep evolving the “pool of images” through various “generations”, every time “modulating” things to add complexity, add structure, form, “VI”;
- This is something that I will be looking at in the coming Production-Year.
11:46 2018–06–27
- One project that I will continue working on this coming Production-Year is The White Point Project; The White Point Project has many facets, and one of them is the generation of “visual tests”; These are like color tests or light tests in photography;
- Part of the concept is the concept of the “infinitessimal offwhite”, i.e. colors that are “infinitessimally close to” white; They are not white, they are just very close;
- I did these kinds of tests on canvas; I diluted white paint and added just a touch of yellow, or pink, or blue, depending on the given experiment; Then I photographed my canvasses outdoors in the sun; Depending on the color of the light, the canvas reacted, at least in my retina, to the COLOR OF THE SUNLIGHT; If I looked at my canvasses indoors, they took on different hues;
- Really part of the White Point Project has to do with the psychophysics of SEEING/SIGHT; It appears that the retina is “influenced” by surrounding colors, as though colors “stick” to the retina for a certain number of milliseconds AFTER viewing a given color; In any case, I will be doing these kinds of tests in the coming Production-Year.
19:18 2018–07–01
- As I have mentioned numerous times, in the period circa 2001–2004, I was working on an art-research project called The History-Project;
- The basic premise for the painting series of History-Paintings was that I was attempting to “paint the concept(s) of History”;
- I now realize that I have never stopped making my “History-Paintings”. Here is an example of a History-type painting from 2018;
- As you can see, I have created a “distressed” texture through digital synthesis; It looks like an old piece of metal or something, and that’s what the concept of “History” looks like to me in 2018;
- I also began making “Refcards” for The History-Project, for the novel of the same name as my art-research project, i.e.
- The novel, The History-Project, was the story of a team of intellectuals getting together in Montreal, circa 2001–2004, to work on a research project of the same name, The History-Project;
- I will be working on this in the course of the new Production-Year 2019–2020;
- What you can expect in the coming Production-Year: I will be working on “Archive-Paintings”. It’s a long story, but in the Summer of 2001, I “reinvented” the History-Painting genre; I then came to develop two other genres, the Technique-Painting and the Process-Painting, also known as Procedural-Painting; The Archives-Painting is an important part of the multidisciplinary art-research project known as The Archives-Project;
20:51 2018–07–02
- Over the course of the last 17 years, I have been working on a series of paintings called The History-Project, made up of so-called “History-Paintings”; These paintings have evolved over the years. It started out with me wanting to “paint the concept(s) of History”; Now I find that I’ve accomplished that to some degree, with distressed textures, synthetic textures, designed via computer software;
- I have already showed a great example of this earlier in this presentation; What I wanted to show now is the “locus” if you will, of the historical processes, always moving forwards, adding shape and other material phenomena;
- The arrow of time moves ONWARD EVERLASTING; and the “noise” of the past ADDS UP, to formulate a kind of random walk pattern; I will be looking at this further in the coming Production-Year, 2019–2020;
- As I keep reminding my audience, in the Summer of 2001, I started an interdisciplinary art-research project called The History-Project where I began by trying to “paint the concept(s) of History”. This image goes in that direction. It’s meant to show that History is always moving forward. There are always many sources, and the sources tend to get entangled. But you always reach a tipping point or a critical point. That’s what the arrow symbolizes.
16:05 2018–07–04
- As you may know by now, I am terribly obsessed with NOISE and all things that have to do with NOISE(s); I continuously do experiments with noise in both the visual arts and in my ambient experimental sound design; In fact, my methodology for digital design (visual) is the same methodology I use in my sound design practice;
- It’s no secret, I start with noise, always, seed noise I call it; I start with noise and I modulate the noise until I get some “structure” that I find is “visually interesting” in the case of visual design; In sound design I don’t always necessarily start with noise, sometimes I start with pure sine waves, ,or square waves, but I’m constantly adding noise to things;
- As a musician I’ve done a lot of improvizing in bands where we played a lot with noise, I’ve also played with many different types of synthesizers and have 20+ years experience in playing with noise in music and sound design; That being said, I just did an interesting experiment, I will explain:
- What I literally did was take graphs of random walks off the internet, superimposed them on top of one another as layers, after I scaled them and reshaped them and so on, and then I just played with the opacity of the layers, also playing with the contrast and luminosity; The result looks like an eerie dark forest or something, a place I called “White Castle” just because it sounded right; I did many such experiments:
- Here I was going with the idea of a mountainous terrain, I called it NOISE RIDGE; I have been doing these kinds of experiments for years, and will continue to do so; Here’s one from 2015 in a similar vein:
- Here I used white noise, I took the “fringe” if you will off the top of some graphs of white noise and played around with layers and made what I thought looked like a city skyline;
- In any case, that’s what I do; I start with seed noise and I make populations of images, selecting the ones that are most “arresting” visually; It is a measure I call “visual interestingness” and I think it is an actual objective measure, and I hope to write software that can independently create these kinds of abstract “landscapes” if you will; It’s not very complicated.
15:56 2018–07–05
- As you may have realized, I’m still obsessed with my “History-Project” which I started 17 years ago; Just before I made one of my “noise field” designs that I thought looked like my very first “History-Paintings” in the History-Project series;
- What’s fun with digital media / digital technology is the ease with which we can modulate pictures; I made several different version of this same painting, trying to generate structure morphologically;
- As always, I began with pure noise and moved my way towards a configuration of pixel values that I thought was “visually interesting”, had high “VI” as I say now with my new lingo;
- I was imagining these old Italian villages or something; There’s so much that one can do with noise, or with noise fields as I call them; It just takes a hint of a given structure/morphology and it begins to take on a life of its own; I definitely will continue experimenting with this design workflow management methodology in the coming Production-Year;
- I like to make these “abstract cities” or “abstract landscapes”; I play a lot with imaginary “places” or “spaces” in my novels; in my novelistic work for the History-Project novel, I invented several imaginary places like Crackland, the Dream Assembly and St-Elsewhere; Now with these simple digital designs, I am finding imaginary cities all over again;
- It’s good to be able to go back “into the archive” and play again with old familiar places and themes, concepts and spaces and structures and so forth; in fact that’s what the Archives-Project is all about!:
- I’m playing with my concept of “Antique-Moderne”, which is a style; It’s hard to explain, but one way to put it is that it has to do with old worn-out textures; I try to “synthesize” textures, in an abstract way, i.e. I try to make a pattern that just has the flavor of a city, or a random landscape, a forest, some mountainous regions, like you saw in my images above:
11:48 2018–07–18
- I’ve been working with a concept of “moral temperature” or “moral climate” for years now; The concept comes from Hippolyte Taine;
- EXCERPT: “Just as there is a physical temperature, which by its variations determines the appearance of this or that species of plant, so is there a moral temperature, which by its variations determines the appearance of this or that species of art. And as we study the physical temperature in order to comprehend the advent of this or that species of plants, whether maize or oats, the orange or the pine, so is it necessary to study the moral temperature in order to comprehend the advent of various phases of art, whether pagan sculpture or realistic painting, mystic architecture or classic literature, voluptuous music or ideal poetry. The productions of the human mind, like those of animated nature, can only be explained by their milieu.” — Hippolyte Taine, p.32–33, The Philosophy of Art
- What I imagine was a kind of “Moral Temperature Reader”, a kind of “thermometer” if you will of moral temperature; I made several mock-ups just to give an idea of what it could look like; as you can see, in the “visor” of sorts, you see one of my “noise fields”;
- The design is simple; You have a window at the tope which shows the “data terrain” if you will, and some form of input in the bottom half to “control” the window with the moral temperature “reading”;
- The above design I just made, but I made other versions several years ago; The most basic design is just a circle and a square, a circle at the top and a square at the bottom;
- This is definitely something that I will be investigating further in the coming Production-Year 2019–2020; I will be making other designs, and am in the process of trying to actually write the code to the “moral temp card system”, based on my Refcards-System;
- My theory of moral temperature departs somewhat from H. Taine’s conception; That is, to me every point on earth where there are people has its own moral temperature reading, i.e. you could almost see it as a form of “social mood”, as in Socionomics, except not linked to financial markets;
- As you can see also, in the top half of the Moral Temperature Reader, you essentially have one of my “noise fields”; I actually have a full-blown “Noise Field Theory” which basically states that everything is a noise field;
- To show what I mean, I’m trying to come up with “noise fields” that are more “intuitive”, i.e.
- The idea is really to intimate the spherical aspect of a three-dimensional noise, because noises in the real world are three-dimensional; at least they are in the case of noise fields in my noise field theory, though most of my digital designs/syntheses are 2D;
07:55 2018–07–22
- You will see in the coming months that I will be doing more and more experiments with noise; Basically all my digital designs/compositions are built upon “seed noise”; Here is an experiment called a “Noise Ball”:
- The idea was to generate/synthesize noise in 3D; It didn’t necessarily turn out as I would have hoped, I wanted a real noise field in 3D; What I got was a noise ball;
- Mathematically speaking it is composed of Gaussian noise; It is therefore a “noise field”; Noise Field Theory states that everything is made up of noise; That is, there is nothing which exists in the universe WITHOUT NOISE; There is always a noise element (or “noxel” as I call them);
- The noise term can be expressed as η(t); It is an additive randomly distributed noise term; To me everything is made up of a noise field, the universe itself is a very large Noise Field; It is noise in all directions;
- Even a vacuum state is a noise field in my worldview because there are fluctuations inside the state;
16:50 2018–08–25
- I have been very busy since my last entry on July 22nd, 2018. I have been playing with noise as usual, my so-called “seed noise”; Usually I’m starting with Gaussian noise and trying to add “structure” to it, a structure that is minimally visually interesting; Here is an example of what I can do using basic pixelization functions; Structure emerges from the chaos;
- I will be experimenting with this further in the coming Production-Year;
- As will become evident over the next little while is that I’ve been playing around a lot with STYLES; Here is an example of a work of digital synthesis which I found had the “texture” if you will, of a Pointillist painting; As you will see, I’ve even begun working with neural style transfer, as a tool for creating innovative visual art;
- Again, as always, this time I’m playing aroud with the “look & feel” of “PATINA”, as you might find on bronze or on some other material; Here the result is very “pixelated”, but I found that overall it had the “texture” if you will of PATINA; I will be experimenting with this further;
- I’ve been making digital designs for years now, and a theme that constantly comes up is the theme of the CITY; here is a texture that makes me think of cities, for some reason; maybe it’s because it’s the color of concrete, I don’t know;
- It’s still the same process, I start with seed noise and modulate the noise using basic image processing functions until I find a structure that is visually stimulating, has a given measure of what I call “VI” or “visual inerestingness”;
- The following Noise Field is an even better example of a city-like texture/structure, except here it is very colorful;
- Here below is a particularly successful and innovative “Noise Field”; It took many “generations” of “modulations of the noise field” to come to this “texture”; It has the texture of granite, yet it also very noisy;
- As you will see in the coming months, I will often be exploring the “liminal” spaces between things; the boundaries between “signal” and “noise”, between “noise” and “image”, always “at the limits of X”;
- I haven’t written a great deal about this, but in the past couple of years, I have kept “labnotes” of my experiments in painting; I also imagined a “system” called the “Refcards-System” which consists of cards with the metadata fields shown below;
- The idea of the “Refcard” is to “capture” if you will what I call the “moral temperature” or “moral climate” of a time and place; I stole the concept of moral temperature from Hippolyte Taine;
- The idea is to have people all around the world writing these kinds of Refcards, and a global system for putting them together; One would have a kind of unique “cardbox” where one could keep card-sets, “decks” or “stacks” if you will; I will be writing more about this soon;
- Below is a SIGNATURE that I worked on, meant to be a spin off of UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage LOGO;
- More to come…
A.G. © 2018. All Rights Reserved.
