Anna Ursyn
Generative art results in precise images with perfect lines that follow premeditated transformations. I started working with computers by programming, with a distant dumb terminal connected to the station via modem and a phone. I waited two hours for b&w prints and three days for color slides. I remember loosing generations when working with film as an analog medium. I could include color, shade, patterns, apply clipping algorithms, rotate and paste content into other images, zoom and transform. Then, photo silk screen and photolithograph gave me a new level of color combinations, and the messiness of paint. Movies involved the fourth dimension. Through the use of software I can recycle drawings along with generative shapes and patterns. We can only change the distance when we look at the two-dimensional work, yet we can walk around the sculpture and explore the interactive character of time-based art. By adding action inside the surface of the image, I hope to attain another level of possible connotations and interpretations. The next stage – combining it all together and adding painterly marking – became fully digital. I transform algorithmic images into physical constructions. Free of detail images became synthetic expressions of the figure. I also created sculptural forms in 3-D programs and used prototyping. In order to address the factor of time and add some explanatory power and dynamic storytelling, I present images along with related movies.
BIOGRAPHY:
In my work I integrate service, research, and teaching. I serve by editing a book “Biologically-Inspired Computing for the Arts: Scientific Data through Graphics,” and chairing the D-Art Gallery for the International Conference on Information Visualization, London. I perform research work, then pass the outcomes on to my students, and thus inspire them to create computer graphic projects. I test and assess my questions and results by creating my own art on the themes I am working on. This completes the circle. I explore relations between natural, constructed, and imagined structures. My current project is about nature versus technology, city life versus rural environment, animal world versus humans. My task is to juxtapose the regularity of nature with man's constructions, both physical and intellectual. I am working on a project about water, centered on biologically inspired computing for the arts. I explore what technological and human worlds have in common. I synthesize my previous and current experiences and art works to build my new line of research because these themes appear continuously in nature-related and art-related projects and support my background and resources while working on these projects.