The Beauty of Abstract Art
The playfulness and freedom
of making abstract digital artifacts
Welcome to the fluid liminal realm of
inspiration, imagination and intuition
Maybe I should not use the word “art” because it is so very used up and serious and old and only good anymore for museums and pedestals.
[ Kidding – I love to have a lazy afternoon in a good museum! These days I dont get way too little of that. ]
But artifact or artefact works fine for me, it is not all that serious and its semantic meaning is closer to the feeling that I have in mind for this article.
Dictionary: ar•ti-fact
– an object made or modified by a human being, typically one of cultural or historical interest: the artifacts include pottery, bones, metals, beads, and stone tools, photographs, documents, videos, letters, and other things.
– something observed in a scientific investigation or experiment that is not naturally present but occurs as a result of the investigative procedure.
– a fault in a digital image or in data that appears as a result of the methods used to create it.
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Well, welcome to the wonderful realm of multi-level meanings, symbolic language, associative thinking, archetypes, poems and koans.
The liminal space – so called 🤨🤔.
Dictionary: liminal
– relating to, or situated at a sensory threshold : barely perceptible or capable of eliciting a response.
– relating to, or being an intermediate state, phase, or condition.
It would be wise and advised to send the logic and the reason, the purpose and the goal for a holiday and simply enjoy the fluid moment of now.
Curiosity and feeling, contemplation and keeping an open mind is the recommended attitude, when it comes to abstract art of the kind that I wish to show here.
A willingness to take time is a precious commodity these days, I know, I know.
And so is the ability to avoid a jump to conclusions all too quick.
I recommend letting “it” in.
Whatever it may be.
The eyes of a child in wonder – this is the best way I can describe the kind of attitude I wish for.
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Personally, I have come a long way to arrive at abstract art, the digital kind …
And amazing journey, if I think of it!
Once upon a time, being trained as Electrical Engineer, this gave me the ability to understand electronic hardware and maybe even build some of it – if I must.
As a passionate user of computers I have used intuition and common sense to overcome the steep learning curve of high end applications. An approach that has empowered me greatly to produce cool things with my machine.
And as a programmer of web technology I know how to code all kinds of things that can be see on the screen – limited only to my creative imagination.
All those rather intense periods of my life and the learning that was taking place, gave me ever increasing levels of freedom of expression that I enjoy greatly.
What I call “the liminal space of creative freedom” on the threshold between different media, where music and sound-making can talk to visual media and translate into animated fonts and color design and whitespace, and and and and … and back.
Where i can transition from code to video to text to synthesizer and use advanced programs like TouchDesigner, VCV Rack modular synths, Cubase, Photoshop, Premiere, After Effect and many more tools in a fluid way.
Thats the freedom of the digital realm for me.
And with making art, it all comes together in many joyful ways.
Creating digital artifacts transcends and includes all the above.
When I allow myself to be in that space – my inner atelier so to say – I experience again the playfulness of a child, the timeless space of fully being there.
Activity without an obvious purpose, detachment from the usefulness of the products of my engagement.
Full and total engagement, actually.
Pure being, but in full action.
It is a meditation of sorts, that is what it is.
Very here and now.
Very focussed, yet very flowing.
Associative thinking.
Intuitive feeling.
I feel the networks of my brain all lit up.
Synapses all ready and jumping.
My breath relaxed and deep.
No effort at all.
Flow.
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Cute, right?
Last couple of years TouchDesigner and AfterEffect have been my favorite tools / toys to create such kinds of things. But honestly I have lost a lot of my passion and motivation for it.
I think this is due to the fact that all those very highly sophisticated programs are islands onto themselves and it is rather complicated if not impossible to let them interact with each other.
Sometimes it’s possible to hack some code that does some interactive tricks, but mostly one can only make a little video of the end product to publish on the web.
And thats it. No real interactivity with this kind of high end technology.
When I started to learn to use the late and great Adobe Flash program 25 years ago, there was the promise and the vision of some alive, interactive web-content, that would be limitless creative, interactive, utilizing video, image, text, sound, animation, code and all in one.
And it was like this for a while and a lot of creative designers, playful coders and some serious artists shared this online space of creative exploration. Some really crazy websites popped up back then.
Now the scenery has changed, Flash got killed by bigger interests and the creative kids became established experts. The web has lost its innocence and is a commercial wasteland by now (ok, ok, I am overdoing it a bit 😆). Still lot of interesting things are there, if you look around enough.
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Now, what about art, innovative abstract digital art, immersive non-linear multimedia art-istic experiences?
I guess it’s not on the web, the screen is just too small to be immersive, the computer can not replicate the dedicated space of the museum or a gallery.
And the Attention Deficit Disorder is simply too ingrained into our habits, the mobile-phone-scrolling-syndrome is the antidote of a contemplative art experience.
Sorry Cris, that’s just how it is. 🥲
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But there are some – a few – innovative spaces out there in the real world where people explore the liminal space, the still fluid, undefined areas that will be explored in the coming years.
About this, I am certain.
And I am curious what we are going to see.
One such place I know about is the ARTECHOUSE in the USA. Check it out.
Maybe it’s not “some serious art” that you can experience there.
But certainly it’s immersive!
Another one of those spaces is TeamLab, a, international arts collective that creates rather fantastical immersive experiences around the world, New York / London / Beijing / Hong Kong / Seoul / Geneva / Palo Alto.
“TeamLab’s collaborative practice seeks to navigate the confluence of art, science, technology, and the natural world. Through art, the interdisciplinary group of specialists, including artists, programmers, engineers, CG animators, mathematicians, and architects, aims to explore the relationship between the self and the world, and new forms of perception.
In order to understand the world around them, people separate it into independent entities with perceived boundaries between them. teamLab seeks to transcend these boundaries in our perceptions of the world, of the relationship between the self and the world, and of the continuity of time. Everything exists in a long, fragile yet miraculous, borderless continuity.”
Sounds pretty liminal to me 😃.
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What will happen next in the arts and from now on into the future, this is anybody’s guess! With Generative Artificial Intelligence applications becoming more capable and mind-blowing by the day, we will see a lot of things that we have never seen before. I am pretty sure about that.
Besides the chatbots that most know and use already that can spit out poems and essays for us if we are too lazy to write them ourself, there are text-to-image models and applications such as Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, and DALL-E; and text-to-video models such as Veo and Sora.
Generative AI systems such as MusicLM and MusicGen can also be trained on the audio waveforms of recorded music along with text annotations, in order to generate new musical samples based on text descriptions such as “a calming violin melody backed by a distorted guitar riff”.
Already now people using image and video generating apps to flood the internet with a deluge of low quality and uninspired pictures and small videos – AI slop – that are produced in mere seconds or even automated. This deluge is actually already cloaking the internet, something like visual spam.
Obviously, now are the early stages of the Age of AI and a lot of mistakes are made – and some learning too, I hope.
On the other hand, in the hands of a truly creative and inspired person – a so called artist 🤩 – AI could be just another paintbrush, another film camera, another poets notebook.
I dont know but i am pretty sure that we will all see (if we are still around for a while.
We will see what we will see.
May we live in interesting times.
So be it!