Process Synthesis

Dates: 2024-08-01 -- 2024-09-01

Location: Generative Gallery

Photos

Most digital artists strive to set uncontrollable parameters that would lead to unpredictable results. If an artwork does not surprise its author to a certain degree, in my opinion, it is not a successful enough artwork.

©Rafael Lozano-Hemmer

The “Process Synthesis” media art exhibition of arthew0 dedicated to the studies of generative processes will open the series of total installations at the Generative Gallery. The constructive principle of the exposition is synthesizer, meaning that each installation is supposed to be a part of a single sound composition without losing its place and self-sufficiency.

arthew0 sees his creative career as a continuing experiment, only a small part of which emerges in the view of the public. Some steps are divided by a gap several years long, some remain private, and others lead into deadlock.

“Process Synthesis” is a meta-project bringing together his experiments in recent years that gradually made their appearance in exhibitions, installations and audio-visual live performances to eventually build a single digital organism. In a range of projects exhibited, the generative approach was implemented. The use of algorithms allows arthew0 to showcase ideas which he wouldn’t be able to incarnate manually.

For instance, in one of the projects, the most popular hashtags of the day from a social medium we used to know as Twitter form a colour cast of the day, manifesting arthew0’s refusal to focus on the news agenda.

In Jamming bot, the bot aimlessly rambles around the Internet, gathering crumbs of senses like a philosopher of a postapocalyptic Internet era. In another project, based on Kandinsky’s works on the sound of shapes, a generative algorithm scans shapes of the wax in a lava lamp and transfers them onto the sound track.

The author’s solutions give a tangible example of the idea that any kind of information in our environment can go through programming.

The majority of the works at the exhibition result from artistic studies – technically, they are hypothesis testing related to the scientific approach. Projects by arthew0 translate into knowledge production rather than accomplished artwork. This processual performance, which will keep going throughout the exhibition, is like an experiment with an unpredictable outcome. Organizing the show in such a way, the artist denounces the overproduction crisis in the domain of art and states the intrinsic value of the process.

Anna Smirnova, curator

Source: https://generativegallery.com/processsynthesis_en/