Tell me about your experience creating an installation for the Burrard Arts Foundation Garage space?

It was a great learning experience to put on a full show, especially one that wasn’t self-organized. I’ve done a few shows that I’ve [independently] crafted together. Being on the back end of organizing exhibitions, a lot at UBC – and now the Vancouver Art Gallery – I knew what was required to make the installation run smoothly. Having said that I planned for a long time to get all my ducks in a row, and avoid hiccups.

I worked for BAF previously, from 2015 – 2017, first as an intern and then as a hired prep sporadically, which was a job that directly led into working at the Vancouver Art Gallery, thus solidifying my work experience. But I was familiar with the old space up on Broadway, I knew it like the back of my hand, but this exhibition, being the second artist to show in the garage space, I was starting from square one!

[The Garage] was really a great experience. As with any spatial economy situation in Vancouver, budgeting for emerging artists in this city is impossible. If it weren’t for the resources I had from BAF, in addition to equipment loans and help of friends it totally wouldn’t have happened.

Would you say this work is site-specific in regards to the scale and number of screens?

Entirely. The work is by definition a piece of software, the implementation is variable. My original draft proposal was for one screen; taking one of these 36 and making that the singular work, using one computer, one program. Simple.

But I think the work is enhanced by this. That buzzword ‘multitudes’ comes to mind. I was forced by constraints like natural light, the cost and unsuitability of 24/7 projection or synchronizing video walls. These constraints made me reach further and make a more ambitious work . This is definitely the largest since the big ol’ pile of lumber I exhibited for my grad, sudden collapse. If I had just one screen, one iteration of the program, I think the actual massiveness of generative possibility would’ve been lost, and wouldn’t communicate just how fleeting and random the work is. It’s funny; consciously you know the best ideas derive from limitations and detours, but they still sneak up on you.

Doing a full test of all 36 screens also revealed other site-specific conditions, such as how hot the garage space really gets, even with the windows semi-covered. I had the program testing for almost six months, running continuously, but I didn’t quite get all those screens running at once until about the week before. The reality of having them all in one room, running at once… That little room gets piping hot, I will say. It becomes a total greenhouse. I know Alex Achtem ran into this with all of her water just evaporating to dew up the glass. It was all fine of course, but that’s one example of a site-specific consideration that passed my radar.

Typically is there a very solid visualization of a piece for you, precursory to coding a program?

Definitely not. Well, partially, but it ventures so far afield that it’s effectively unrecognizable. Something I’ve been thinking recently is that coding is a material. I find myself pushing numbers like paint and rearranging probabilities like I would lay pieces of lumber together. This viewpoint kind of allows me to take artistic approaches and apply them to a very technical process. Not everything applies or carries over, but the idea of taking ten percent of your last project is one I unconsciously stick by. There are snippets of code here and there, algorithms and math that get repeated and altered from past works, and that helps define a starting point at least.

For example, I used an old 2.5-dimensional trick from retro games of stacking isometric images to make Understructures look vaguely flat and deep simultaneously. [At the time] I was most concerned with the frame of the screen and its functioning as a false window. This simple repetition, the drawing of motion without erasing the last frame upon refresh, is what makes Ouroboros accumulate endlessly. So I can start with a little tactic like that to kick off.

It’s this simple idea, “teach a computer to paint in a way that only it can,” that I ran with from the very start, not a perfect mental snapshot of the end goal but a consistent idea. I’m wary of calling it a thesis, but there we go. 

From there on, it’s just iterating, adding features and variables, letting it simmer, scheduling events, and then finding a spot where I had to stop myself. Take a breath, step back, and realize I had made something utterly boring. The code had a single purpose, one behaviour. To make this generation actually surprise me again I had to take every single hardcoded choice, TRUEs and FALSEs, every preconception about where the artwork should go, and turn those into probabilities, a chance of behaviour. Long stroke, short stroke, edge detection, complexity analysis, color vibrancy; even just brush speed. Dealing with brush speed per frame starts to make different textures and interference patterns, but you don’t want to just pick one, that’s way too monotonous, and you also don’t want it moving so randomly its not patternistic, or so fast it skips the page, etc etc. It’s becomes primarily about making a system and tuning probabilities to 80% of what you want and expect, and 20% sweet chili heat…

• It was definitely important from the beginning to deal on a pixel-by-pixel textural level, as I always do, like Holy Generator or Architectures III, where the whole point is observing interference patterns on the threshold of the screen surface, (you can even zoom in on architectures, one of my few interactive pieces so you could open it in Chrome and get your face in it). Ouroboros wasn’t all about this, about the grid of the screen, but seeing as I was trying to achieve pure aestheticization/corruption of the source material, my personal artistic leanings had a field day!!

• This work is notoriously hard to record, trying to post to instagram just made the video go to mush. The video streaming to the displays is just so complex, you get to this level that only can be generated, that’s actually better to be generated instead of playing a ten-minute video the size of a terabyte on loop.

[Lastly] the Windows XP glitch renaissance!

Can you expand on the relationship of the ouroboros and your visual theory of  “derivative overdrive”?

Derivative Overdrive started as a joke, about iterating off failed artworks until you can’t explain how you got there, like trying to deep dive into explaining bitcoin half-drunk at a party only to find yourself talking about alpaca wool. It was an anti-perfectionist artistic exercise for myself, about purposefully taking the road less traveled when a plotter print failed, scanning it, 3D modelling it, taking scribbles, and idealizing them into a waveform, and on and on. Like free association.

It gradually meant something very different to me.

I was grappling with the immensity of available data, (what one fantastic but defunct new-media blog called “prosthetic knowledge”), something too big to keep inside, a superstructure or hyperobject. Either in the form of technical literature or simply living by the social media feed. But being overwhelmed by information and becoming a datahoarder isn’t that novel I don’t think. For example, finding a 13-disc collection of clipart from 1999 at a thrift shop in Nanaimo and knowing it had to be preserved and backed up, like a shiny rock at the beach.

Were there any sources of information in particular that inspired the development of this piece, besides the engineer Paul Buran?

No defined image sources, I mostly skimmed Google images, wikipedia, getty, etc.

Are there any elements in this work or others that you want to develop further, or that you weren’t satisfied with here?

In the last 2-3 years I’ve become drawn to text art, or inclusion of text. At present, I just focus on titles, though I am working on something that will be up in September that relies much more heavily on poetics.

The tone of the titles I create isn’t always the same as the tone of the work. However, the title does determine the final work itself. I always have a drafted list of titles kept [on hand], that vary widely in between being ornate and direct. Titles are the most artistic process that I go through making a work, or at least they fit that guilty romantic vision for me. It’s a process where I feel least constrained and]can absolutely iterate creatively without any technical effort at all, versus spending months (or in this case a year-plus) coding a program. 

I used to jot in a sketchbook but recently I’ve been leaving comments in the code as I go for reference. Sometimes a codebase will be left alone for months at a time, but with the notes I can come back and think “oh, good someone knows what’s happening here!” It’s a point of reference. Sometimes they’re tongue ‘n’ cheek but most of the time they’re practical. The last thing I was [working with in a sketchbook] was doing plotter work, machine drawings as a way of iterating, and I’d like to get back into that. More plotter artwork and more random iterations. I think this would help bridge the time in between big projects, since it’s the percolation [of thought] where things really happen, not the one night you stay up until 7am working on one iteration of a piece of code that’s been stewing. 

I’d also like to follow my nose on the idea of machine agency, releasing more control to the generative process. This may take me over into making AI and adversarial networks, but who knows?