Ernest Edmonds, Shaping Space, 2012, Computer generated interactive installation, 235 x 370 cm
Ernest Edmonds: LIGHT LOGIC
GUEST ARTISTS: JOSH HARLE – SEAN CLARK
11 June – 13 July 2013
Ernest Edmonds’ art explores colour, time and interaction in the context of colour field painting and systems art. His work extends the Constructivist tradition into the digital age in a powerful and enduring investigation of mathematical and computational systems.
Born in London in 1942, he began painting at an early age and continued to do so throughout his formal education in mathematics, philosophy and logic. Throughout his life, he has made artworks with reflected as well as transmitted light, both painting and writing code to make interactive generative works. He has exhibited computer-based and systems art around the world since 1970 and showed the first computer-generated video at Exhibiting Space in 1985.
As well as creating new art forms and publishing widely, he continues to contribute to art research through the positions of Professor of Computation and Creative Media at the University of Technology, Sydney and Professor of Computational Art at De Montfort University, Leicester, UK. He is Editor-in-Chief of Transactions in the leading MIT Press art and science journal, Leonardo. His work is in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, who are collecting his archives, and he is represented in the pioneer section of the on-line DAM Museum, Berlin.
Ernest Edmonds comments:
“The Light Logic exhibition shows a dialogue between time-based computer generated art and paintings, each influencing the other. The Shaping Form (and Shaping Space) time-based series consists of unique abstract interactive artwork that are each generating colours and forms in time from a set of unique rules: rules that are rather like their DNA. They also take data from a camera and continuously calculate the amount of activity seen in front of the work. The computer software then steadily modifies the rules. The artwork and its development over time is, then, influenced by the people who look at it. The audience help to shape the work. Shaping Form is a representation of computed life, moving and changing of its own accord but maturing and developing as a result of the movement of audiences. The shaping of the form is a never-ending process of computed development. The paintings explore moments of the process and, in particular, the nature of the colours being used, contrasting the logics of transmitted and reflected light”
INTERACTING INTERACTIVE ARTWORKS – COLOURNET
Artworks in the gallery, on iPads and on your own phone talk to one another.
The 2013 Vivid festival was full of displays with which the public interact: interactive artworks. Ernest Edmonds’ art is also often interactive, but ColourNet takes this a step further. The ColourNet art system allows a collection of interactive artworks to also interact with one another. Several artists can make independent works that influence one another over the Internet. They can range from large installations, such as those seen in Vivid, to phone Apps. Ernest Edmonds’ Light Logic exhibition at the Conny Dietzschold Gallery includes ColourNet and he has co-operated with two guest artists who have produced their own works as part of the art system.
Corelli’s Cafe is an interactive video work by Josh Harle from Sydney. It will be shown on an iPad as part of the ColourNet installation.
Transformations is by Sean Clark from the UK. Transformations will also be demonstrated on an iPad but can also work on your own smartphone.
JOSH HARLE
Josh Harle is a new media artist and PhD researcher examining the representation of space through an Australian Research Council Linkage grant. He has a background in Computer Science, Fine Art, and Continental Philosophy, and works between the School of Design, COFA, and the Faculty of the Built Environment, UNSW.
His current work explores the interplay between the first-hand embodied experience of the world and the set of mechanisms and practices that are used to organise it. His research focuses on the diverse ways of inhabiting space, how emerging technologies are changing these, and why emergent, poetic accounts of the city are important.
SEAN CLARK
Sean Clark is a digital artist, PhD researcher, the director of web/mobile developer Cuttlefish and the curator of “Interact” in Leicester, UK. In his artistic work he is inspired by systems theory, the nature of interactivity and creative explorations of flow and connectedness.