This ad came on my television this morning and it made me stop and look. I can’t remember the last time I actually watched a commercial… It’s a campaign from July of last year made by Art.com, an amazing website selling fine art prints of the best, most beautiful kind. You can even choose a living room that looks like yours to see what the prints would look like in the space.
In the commercial, the framed Art.com poster works as a portal into masterpieces turned three-dimensional, emphasizing how different a room feels when there’s a painting inside it. The three-dimensional part is kind of mind-blowing, it volumizes the paint, transforming the works of art into a really incredible Pixar movie the we float through one at a time. The whole thing is set to the upbeat rallying sounds of “I Could Go” by Oberhofer.
Bridge Over a Pond of Water Lilies, Claude Monet 1899
Andreas Nicolas Fisher goes by ANF online, and he’s an artist working on a whole other level. He makes things that make art, using generative systems and visualizations of data to create graphics, sculptures and installations.
He lives and works in Berlin, and all of his pieces have a simplicity to them that makes them look sleek and organic, like a piece of perfection picked up from the earth. These data waves show boring information in the most beautiful way possible – the message behind the data is lost, but the aesthetic created makes it worth it.
He made these graphics through an original computer program that converts data into long elegant strings of color. The strings almost look like hair swimming in water, like seeing a magnified view of a mermaid’s luscious, multi-colored locks.
His website reads that ANF “concerns himself with the physical manifestation of digital processes and data through generative systems to create sculptures, videos, prints and installations.” He holds an MA from the Berlin University of the Arts, and currently has work on view in Paris and North Carolina.
These lovely lettered butterflies were created by a 25-year-old graphic design student who used a different font for each. He goes only by guusan, and on loftwork, the Japanese portfolio site where these images were uploaded, he said, “I imagined different fonts as butterflies and then created a specimen book based on that.”
These typographic butterflies use the shape of the letters to decide whether each wing will curve or point, and “I’s” and “J’s” stretch up to form antennas. The color schemes correspond to the severity of the letter’s shapes – Helvetica Light is black, gray and yellow, Futura Medium is green and turquoise with a hint of red, and Garamond Bold is mostly black with splashes of orange, red and yellow thrown in. Each wing is the mirror of its opposite – jumbled letters that are given shape, color and a significance that might let them fly away.
Two Masters students at Switzerland’s Basel Academy of Art have created a robot capable of painting original artwork. The word “original” floats fairly close to the word “random,” prompting the question: can a robot make art? Maybe the robot is the art. After all, art making art is very meta.
Made up of two aluminum arms and an acrylic box on wheels that’s been laser cut according to original design, the robot is named BNJMN – but pronounced like the name Benjamin, the use of acronym playing with the idea that this little nonliving bot can do something only humans are supposed to. Made from the minds of students Danilo Wanner and Travis Purrington, it’s described as a “mobile sensory image production mechanism,” and it’s programmed with 436 lines of code that tell it to roam in search of paper, paint whatever, and sign the work before beginning the cycle over again.
BNJMN has five servomechanisms for movement and two sensors for art-making. It’s able to move straight ahead or rotate, using the light sensor and the touch sensor to find paper by determining the amount of reflected light gathered.
The two aluminum arms are coded with a program called the Expressive Output Cycle, and are designed with a joint and spring system that allows for control over the pressure of each mark made. BNJMN works remotely with 9V batteries, with an Arduino Uno brain on board along with a remote micro-controller. It also has an on/off switch for resting, something living artists probably wish they had from time to time. Only a robot’s off time is definite.
Animal New York described the robot’s work as “minimal and meditative–a bit like Franz Kline without all the drama.” It moves slowly across the table searching for paper, but once the two arms prepare for brush mode, they spring into action, painting rough jagged lines in red and gray. At the end of the creative cycle, the bot moves down to the corner of the paper and draws a squiggle with a line underneath for a signature.
BNJMN is different from all the art-making robots who came before him in that he’s not coded with a predetermined image to draw. He sketches something different on each piece of paper he finds, and even though the work is still coming from a random set of 0s and 1s, the design itself is still technically autonomous from any sort of human interference.
It’s a funny thing for a robot to do – something without emotion creating in a medium that’s propelled forward by feeling and constantly being driven by the human experience. Little BNJMN knows nothing outside of finding paper and making marks on it – one more way to ponder the question “is it art?”
Even though she creates the likenesses of people, they’re not portraits in any traditional sense. Kumi Yamashita has worked with shadow, alphabet letters, and even shoe prints to render the delicate faces of individuals, using whatever obscure medium she’s working in to highlight every glance, wrinkle and shadow. Her portraits focus on faces and let the rest of the body fade away underneath, each face revealing a perfect, unique composition of nose, eyes, mouth, and cheeks.
Her two newest works were created in opposite ways – the first involves the stripping away of white threads from a single piece of denim, revealing the vertically oriented portrait of a woman who turns to look back at us in “Warp & Weft – Mother #2.” Her second latest work comes from her Constellation series – portraits made from a single unbroken thread that’s been wrapped around a dense forest of galvanized nails. “Constellation – Mana #2” reveals the nail-speckled face of a little Asian girl, her eyes cast down in wonder and her face glowing against a dark background.
“Warp & Weft – Mother #2”
The intricacies of Kumi’s Constellation works can only be fully appreciated in the detail shots that let you see how much intricate detail it takes to capture a likeness with just nails and a single piece of thread. One eye alone takes at least thirty nails, and who knows how many hours to create. According to Kumi’s website each Constellation portrait takes a process lasting many months to create, all the nails piercing through a wooden panel painted solid white.
Detail, “Constellation – Mana #2”
It looks like the little girl is discovering something for the first time, her face glowing and eyebrows arched with interest. In my mind she’s watching Kumi create this very portrait, lips parted in awe as the string is wound rapidly around the nails to create her likeness out of a single black thread.
A Japanese artist living and working in New York City, Kumi Yamashita has been showing her work all over the world since the early 2000s. Her piece “Constellation – Mana” was chosen as a finalist in the Smithsonian’s Outwin Boochever Competition, and will be on display at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C. for almost an entire year, from March 23, 2013 through February 23, 2014. The competition asks artists to create a portrait from a living person they’ve had direct contact with.
According to Philip Kennicott’s Washington Post article about the competition, “Constellation – Mana” shows an image of Kumi’s niece, someone she described as “chatty, awkward and sometimes obnoxious.” Kennicott writes, “From a distance, the portrait appears to be a photograph that has been slightly altered to give its surface the look of a lightly crackled pottery glaze. Closer inspection reveals the astonishingly complicated method of its production: A single fine string has been wound around hundreds of delicate nails, giving a sense of the missing snapshot through the density of the web it creates.”
