Digital Disarray is a sculptural piece embodying the fragility and disconnectedness that is heartache. A fallen desk, a broken keyboard, a jammed printer, a leaning monitor, and tangled cables. They all lay vulnerable on the floor of a well kept office building, situated amongst unread love letters addressed to ex-lovers. This is the inner world where we internalise experiences that were often felt to be unpleasant or frightening. Experiences that were repressed from consciousness, yet remain active in the unconscious.
This is what you don’t see in the other offices.
My heartbeat drums through the speakers my struggle, as the monitor visualises the pulse in the form of creative code; digitally I share with you my cathartic release.
When I first set out this project I had every intention of creating a polargraph (drawing machine) that would create visual representations of heartache in the form of conversation maps. The drawings themselves would have been a byproduct of the participant’s interaction with the computer model; resulting in an abstracted diagnosis of their inner, unacknowledged feelings. I intended on presenting these drawings as randomly composited, fragments of dialogue, similar to Marc Adrian’s 1966 piece; illustrating a participant’s emotions surrounding a particular experience of grief. Bridging abstract thinking, and indexing heartbeat measurements in the form of a diagram.
Within the first month, I successfully constructed the polargraph, creating and connecting its hardware and electrical components such as 3D printed parts, micro-controllers, motors etc. However, the software needed to create even the most basic polargraph proved to be too ambitious a task to finish on my own as an amateur coder. Nonetheless, adapt it so that it could occur in real-time as a collection and cross-reference of sensory data. As a result, I had to re-evaluate my project and set more realistic goals that would bring me towards a well-refined piece.
After having a meeting with David Strang (Head Lecturer in Digital Media Design) and working closely with Digital Art Technician Stewart Starbuck I made the conscious decision to focus on the creative code itself and learn how to manipulate sensory data to create embodied images and figure out ways to make it interactive later. Over the Easter holiday I delved into the book, ‘Learning processing: a beginner's guide to programming images, animation, and interaction’ by Daniel Shiffman, where I learned how to write my sketches that would visualise the data gathered from the Launch How You Feel (LHYF) sessions held the last term.
That period of digitised experimentation was extremely pivotal for this project. I came across quite a few errors that made attributing a string value (a word from the love letter) an integer value (the BPM number) rather difficult. As documented in detail within my sketchbook, I was unable to convert my BPM string array into an integer. Thus making the mathematical manipulation of that data near impossible.
In the time that I awaited guidance from Stewart, I played solely with the numerical data saved from the LHYF session and visualised each number as an ellipse, using its BPM and some random variables to decide it’s diameter, colour and location within the screen. This controlled randomness is central to most - if not all- digital artworks, and is something that I find extremely fascinating. In my dissertation, I write about early 1960s generative art, where artists like Frieder Nake, Micheal A. Noll, and George Nees introduce randomness to their computer programs in the form of geometry, abstraction, and chance. Intrigued with the way the shapes slowly emerged on the screen as though the generative experimentations had a pulse. I began to favour the abstract visuals over the diagrammatic text itself. Time seemed fragmented by the machine as it generated visual sequences that were different and unpredictable.
While the diagram is said to commonly consist of words, or lines of thought to map the relationships between things, Laura Rosser’s shares in her lecture, Unlearning spaces: Diagrammatics Misadventures, that ‘words are interchangeable with objects and software, where even the human voice or body can be used as a diagram and exist beyond the textual as an artistic practice in and of itself’(Rosser, 2019). In David Edwards’ book Art Therapy, diagrams are seen as an illustration of a feeling rather than an embodiment of a feeling. The picture becomes alive and invested only through the image making process where the person engages with their ‘inner world’.
Thereafter, I became fixated on showcasing this inner world with the viewer. In David Edward’s book, one client faced their underlying feelings only after creating messy imageries that invested more feelings of his anger and frustration. I wanted to show that moment of chaos needed to breakthrough into one’s inner world but was unsure how to create a space that would represent that.
It wasn’t until I had a tutorial with Geoff, that I contemplated using office furniture to create a sculptural installation similar to the works of digital artists Eva Franco Mattes, Maurizio Bologini and Nam June Paik. There machines are laid on the floor, interconnected and bare, embodying the human form and the vulnerability that comes with heartache.
I chose to juxtapose the orderly aesthetics of the office space with the chaos that is my piece to shed eradicate the stigma that circulates society’s views on expressing emotions. The piece itself caused controversy with the in-office workers, only 24 hours after installation, and shortly after needed to be de-installed. Ironically, this only further emphasises society’s negated view on people or things in a place of disarray or sorrow.
I am proud of my piece and my growth as a code enthusiast. Though the space it will be showcased for the private show isn’t my desired space, I do believe the message will be read the same.
This is what you don’t see in the other offices.
My heartbeat drums through the speakers my struggle, as the monitor visualises the pulse in the form of creative code; digitally I share with you my cathartic release.
When I first set out this project I had every intention of creating a polargraph (drawing machine) that would create visual representations of heartache in the form of conversation maps. The drawings themselves would have been a byproduct of the participant’s interaction with the computer model; resulting in an abstracted diagnosis of their inner, unacknowledged feelings. I intended on presenting these drawings as randomly composited, fragments of dialogue, similar to Marc Adrian’s 1966 piece; illustrating a participant’s emotions surrounding a particular experience of grief. Bridging abstract thinking, and indexing heartbeat measurements in the form of a diagram.
Within the first month, I successfully constructed the polargraph, creating and connecting its hardware and electrical components such as 3D printed parts, micro-controllers, motors etc. However, the software needed to create even the most basic polargraph proved to be too ambitious a task to finish on my own as an amateur coder. Nonetheless, adapt it so that it could occur in real-time as a collection and cross-reference of sensory data. As a result, I had to re-evaluate my project and set more realistic goals that would bring me towards a well-refined piece.
After having a meeting with David Strang (Head Lecturer in Digital Media Design) and working closely with Digital Art Technician Stewart Starbuck I made the conscious decision to focus on the creative code itself and learn how to manipulate sensory data to create embodied images and figure out ways to make it interactive later. Over the Easter holiday I delved into the book, ‘Learning processing: a beginner's guide to programming images, animation, and interaction’ by Daniel Shiffman, where I learned how to write my sketches that would visualise the data gathered from the Launch How You Feel (LHYF) sessions held the last term.
That period of digitised experimentation was extremely pivotal for this project. I came across quite a few errors that made attributing a string value (a word from the love letter) an integer value (the BPM number) rather difficult. As documented in detail within my sketchbook, I was unable to convert my BPM string array into an integer. Thus making the mathematical manipulation of that data near impossible.
In the time that I awaited guidance from Stewart, I played solely with the numerical data saved from the LHYF session and visualised each number as an ellipse, using its BPM and some random variables to decide it’s diameter, colour and location within the screen. This controlled randomness is central to most - if not all- digital artworks, and is something that I find extremely fascinating. In my dissertation, I write about early 1960s generative art, where artists like Frieder Nake, Micheal A. Noll, and George Nees introduce randomness to their computer programs in the form of geometry, abstraction, and chance. Intrigued with the way the shapes slowly emerged on the screen as though the generative experimentations had a pulse. I began to favour the abstract visuals over the diagrammatic text itself. Time seemed fragmented by the machine as it generated visual sequences that were different and unpredictable.
While the diagram is said to commonly consist of words, or lines of thought to map the relationships between things, Laura Rosser’s shares in her lecture, Unlearning spaces: Diagrammatics Misadventures, that ‘words are interchangeable with objects and software, where even the human voice or body can be used as a diagram and exist beyond the textual as an artistic practice in and of itself’(Rosser, 2019). In David Edwards’ book Art Therapy, diagrams are seen as an illustration of a feeling rather than an embodiment of a feeling. The picture becomes alive and invested only through the image making process where the person engages with their ‘inner world’.
Thereafter, I became fixated on showcasing this inner world with the viewer. In David Edward’s book, one client faced their underlying feelings only after creating messy imageries that invested more feelings of his anger and frustration. I wanted to show that moment of chaos needed to breakthrough into one’s inner world but was unsure how to create a space that would represent that.
It wasn’t until I had a tutorial with Geoff, that I contemplated using office furniture to create a sculptural installation similar to the works of digital artists Eva Franco Mattes, Maurizio Bologini and Nam June Paik. There machines are laid on the floor, interconnected and bare, embodying the human form and the vulnerability that comes with heartache.
I chose to juxtapose the orderly aesthetics of the office space with the chaos that is my piece to shed eradicate the stigma that circulates society’s views on expressing emotions. The piece itself caused controversy with the in-office workers, only 24 hours after installation, and shortly after needed to be de-installed. Ironically, this only further emphasises society’s negated view on people or things in a place of disarray or sorrow.
I am proud of my piece and my growth as a code enthusiast. Though the space it will be showcased for the private show isn’t my desired space, I do believe the message will be read the same.