In the spirit of using code to make art, I want to share a project I did last semester in FNAR 220 with Kayla Romberger. (Highly recommend taking that class!)
I used a script to scan the 150,000+ iMessages stored on my laptop to create a kind of self portrait. If you want to see more on this project check out elinathan.com/My-Texts!
I included an Agnes Martin piece as part of my desktop portrait. Her paintings as seen on a computer screen do not do them justice. The scale and subtlety in her pieces cannot be conveyed unless you see them in person, so while I include some pictures here, it won’t be the same.
Martin said she was not trying to paint anything of or from the world, but instead was trying to paint inspiration and emotion itself.
The famous art dealer Arne Glimcher says this about Agnes Martin:
“Agnes was totally interested in the internal response not the external. She did a cycle of six paintings that MoMA owns, they’re called “With My Back To The World.” The title was the expression of the fact that her work does not refer to anything outside the mind – that it’s all internalised.”
There are a couple quotes from her that I really like.
From music people accept pure emotion but from art they demand explanation.
Even though the next couple of sentences are explanation of her art, I think they may add some useful background to her process. She abandoned the New York art world in 1967 and moved to New Mexico. She lived in adobe homes that she built herself. She was gay. She was diagnosed with schizophrenia. She was friends with artists like Ad Reinhardt and Bruce Nauman. She lived alone most of her life alone, and when she died in 2004, she hadn’t read a newspaper in over 50 years.
If you wake up in the morning and feel very happy, about nothing, no cause, that’s what I paint about, the subtle emotions that we feel without cause in this world.
As Martin’s paintings became popular with collectors, she became wealthy but never moved out of her homes in New Mexico. Instead, she donated millions of dollars to charity, especially organizations who helped marginalized groups and victims of domestic violence.
Slack’s new logo is supposed to resemble a hashtag, or octothorpe. but it represents a lot more than that. Here is what Pentagram, the agency that designed the logo, said about it.
“Derived from the original logo and built on a grid, the new octothorpe is comprised of two basic geometric shapes—a speech bubble and lozenge—that can be extracted and used as graphic elements. The speech bubble evokes communication and connectivity, and will form the basis of a system of customized icons, illustrations and motifs with rounded corners that echo the shapes of the logo.” (https://www.pentagram.com/work/slack/story)
Interestingly, here are some of the iterations they went through before arriving at the final design.
Tauba Auerbach is an artist who works with abstraction and typography. Her works involves type design, something precise, technical and governed by a lot of rules. Her work also includes abstract works, where there aren’t any decisive rules. She combines the two in interesting ways. This is her website: taubaauerbach.com
She creates grid patterns and then creates typefaces based on those grids. She also makes purely abstract works with non traditional methods like this acrylic and glass on wood panel.
If you have an mp3 file, you can upload it to this website and get a visual representation of the sound. I used the sound from this youtube video to make this image.
Then, I warped and distorted the image in illustrator to create this pattern.
2020 Foundations 