X Series

The X Series was created out of some desperation and irritation with notions of New Media, Digital Imaging, Generative Art, and the pointless nonsense that seems to surround so much of the discussion of those kinds of works.

I wanted something cleaner, more "Scientific", but something that was also critical and pointed and also visually engaging. So I started with the essentials - contrast. Black and White. Up and Down. I came up with the cruciform - the horizontal line of the world, and the vertical line of the human form. That seemed fraught with all kinds of religious connotations, and I recoiled from that. I then considered "what IS a cross? What is verticality? What is the horizontal? I determined that neither really exists as such - they are both special cases of diagonals. just as a circle is a special form of an Oval and a Square is a special form of a rectangle, so too, the Vertical and Horizontal are special forms of the diagonal. The Vertical is a diagonal that has no horizontal distance, and the horizontal is a diagonal with no vertical distance.

This consideration lead me to the "X" form. The X form is also a powerful cultural symbol, but has many connotations outside the religious, as it also has many technical references in technology. for instance, I type this, in July 2006, using a computer running Apple OS X. The "X" is a powerful form in contemporary culture, and given that it encompasses the standard "Cross", it seemed much more attractive. Also, it stands as a direct refusal of Mondrian and neoplasticism, the Bauhaus "grid", and so much else in our culture that is directly tied to the vertical and horizontal dimensions.

Then I had to think of the tools I wanted to use to work this X. Building tools specific to a task is a common activity in New Media practice, and it is one I find tiresome. Rather than build a machine to process an X, I simply used off-the-shelf software - Adobe Photoshop and the tools in it. This kept the X Series in my tradition of using Photoshop as an imaging tool and source for compositions, as I have used it for such work since 1993. This led me to examine my imaging practice - where I would do some gestural painting imaging and then use the Wave Filter to alter the image, and then crop the image, and reprocess it until it achieved a compositional quality that satisfied a set of intuitive standards of completion.

Rather than do that, I used Photoshop's Wave filter, once upon the X. The Filter has various settings, and I set up three values for some of them (minimal, median, and maximal) and then set specific values for other settings, so the shifting settings might have a non-shifting value for contrast and understanding. One of the values that could change was the type of Waveform used to process the image. Given my long standing career in electronic music, I saw the waveform choice as a very useful and indeed, critical, part of the exercise. That basically set up the Series into three parts, Sine, Square, and Triangle.

I did not edit or otherwise change any of the images: each is as it was generated by the software. I feel that using standard commercial software is important - otherwise, the design of the custom software would get in the way of the investigation of the X form, which was the original idea. Some of the images are nearly identical to one another. Sometimes the images vary wildly from one to the next. This is all a product of the software, and I believe only adds to the mystery of the work. This is "abstract" art, but it comes more as a result of conceptual efforts, an embodiment of ideas, rather than from a wholly visualistic aesthetic.

Click on a Series below and view each as a sequence at your own pace. If you like a specific image, click on it and you can download and print it up for your edification and pleasure.