Click here to view the embedded video.

Off World is a 24-hour, month-long interactive public installation part of the 2009 Contact Toronto Photography Festival. It is an exhibition of photographs and video by filmmaker Mateo Guez and commissioned by curator Sanaz Mazinani, realized in situ as a 24-hour interactive public installation by me, Andrew Mallis.

The exhibition ran all of May 2009 at CAMERA, an extension of the Stephen Bulger Gallery, located at 1028 Queen Street West, in Toronto, Canada.

the video is intended to be played vertically. Just tilt your head.

Using the Processing language, an image of da Vinci’s La Jaconde – the most reproduced image in the world – is corrupted over time. With each conversion between image formats, a frame is recorded. The title coyly references Marcel Duchamp’s 1919 readymade.

Simulations of reality are prevalent in the video games and cinematic effects that substitute for the immersive space once offered exclusively by painting. As mental landscapes adjust themselves to these new realities, painting offers a visual language established through historical precedent that favors contemplation.

Interaction with digital technology is, for most of us, an important part of our everyday experience. The post-industrial economy has shifted the worker from the factory to the office desk, from the lever to the mouse.

In an age of almost exclusively digital reproduction, the last bastions of analog recording are visibly fading. In recent years, Kodak has imploded buildings previously dedicated to paper operations, signaling not the timely death of the analog, but rather its deliberate annihilation.

With what fidelity are we reproducing our environ- ment? What impact does the pixelization of the visible spectrum have on our perception? Lossy compression reduces file size by sacrificing pixel fidelity for an ap- proximation, for pre-determined patterns.

YouTube’s phenomenal popularity is unhindered by the poor resolution and low sound quality of the site’s (massive) video archive. This speaks to a wetted appetite for content, story, meaning over glamour, high production value, and form. In the context of our everyday experience becoming increasingly mediated, we must to ask ourselves: how lossy do we want our reality?

the Duchamp original, circa 1919

“Visual culture of the modern period, from painting to cinema, is characterized by an intriguing phenomenon: the existence of another virtual space, another three-dimensional world enclosed by a frame and situated inside our normal space.”

Lev Manovich, An Archeology of a Computer Screen
NewMediaTopia. Moscow, Soros Center for the Contemporary Art, 1995

Many modern painters actively use digital photographic sources for photo reference, even painting along side their computer screens. The “live model” is in this case dead, frozen in screen-space even before it is observed by the painter. The subject-object relationship implodes as the artist involves themselves in an act of media translation. The artist’s mark is left on the image like artifacts in JPEG compression.

There was a long hiatus of a hundred years where drawing did not play any role in mathematics because hand and pencil and ruler were exhausted. They were well understood and no longer in the forefront. And the computer did not exist…

One had to create intuition from scratch. Intuition, as it was trained by the usual tools — the hand, the pencil and the ruler — found these shapes quite monstrous and pathological. The old intuition was misleading … I’ve trained my intuition to accept as obvious shapes which were initially rejected as absurd, and I find everyone else can do the same.

— Benoit Mandelbrot

Fractals are mathematical representations of the workings of the universe. Their geometry is the result of iterative algorithms that change over time. They describe what is considered randomness with mathematical accuracy.

Twenty years ago, in his seminal work The Fractal Geometry of Nature, Mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot derived the term “fractal” from the Latin verb frangere, meaning to break or fragment. Each fragment (or fractal) is self-similar, meaning that each part contains the basic structure of the whole.

My use of fractal imagery plays on the idea of representation in art (especially in painting), while simultaneously figuring within the realm of the abstract. Even the physical act of painting is abstracted, subsumed by an artistic process in a Duchampian tradition. However, my pronouncement of these digital ready-mades does not imply finality, as the nature of these images is Nature itself – ever changing.

Play consists of three paintings that have been rendered digitally, from the initial conception to their final execution as giclée prints on canvas. Play is preceded by Foreplay, a series of three 12 x 12 pixel excerpts from the larger images. Foreplay employs silkscreening techniques whose slight imperfections can be conceived of as obliterated by the mathematical threshold and scale of the Play series that follows it.

The visibility of the halftoning process speaks of the nature of print and draws on the pop art tradition of Warhol and Liechtenstein. It also underscores the plastic nature of the images by exposing the processes by which they were composed in order to be perceived by the human eye. Their pixelized origin is apparent and further deconstructed into four halftone screens: cyan, magenta, yellow and black.

These images are a transposition of media; the remaining PLAY evokes their video past. A video signal fed into a computer returned the fractal images to their source media, but in new form (and with it new meaning). The mathematical expression of the fractals is no longer a dynamic function – they have become art-objects/picture-files. They form narratives reminiscent of time-based media’s, yet the image pixelization in Play affords rectilinear stability and brackets a reading of individual images transgressing freeze-frame “nature.”

The next transposition of media attempted here is photographic. Nile, like Play, was conceived digitally, but began as a mathematical formula on my computer.From the visualized equation, a digital negative was generated, then used to create a print on photographic paper; nowhere was a camera used in the process. I have counted on Photography’s strong bond to realism and landscape to faithfully reproduce Nile, while contributing its random grain structure so unlike the pixel. Nile is the first of an ongoing series of formulae/photographic landscapes. Paired with this photograph is another print, degenerated from Nile’s digital file. By modifying the file encoding, the pixels in the resulting image find themselves shuffled and regrouped. Again, the grain interferes/compliments the underlying geometry.

Photorealism is oft thought of as the logical conclusion of representational painting. Yet, Fredric Jameson cites photorealistic painting as a copy not of reality, but of a photograph, which is already a copy of the original. Play copies an original, yet realism, photography (or any technologically driven process of recording images) and painting take on a new configuration as the original is in itself a mathematical abstraction.

The seventeenth century philosophy of René Descartes separated the I from the world, inspiring a new scientific ideal: a mechanistic, fragmented model of the universe. This fragmentation of nature finds a contemporary manifestation as the pixel, the atomic equivalent of a grain of sand.

“In the Mind’s eye, a fractal is a way of seeing infinity,” says author James Gleick. Conversely, the biological eye receives images increasingly moderated by technology and its reductive codification of objective reality. Simulations of reality are prevalent in the video games and cinematic effects that substitute for the immersive space once offered exclusively by painting. As mental landscapes adjust themselves to these new realities, painting offers a visual language established through historical precedent that can adequately maintain the viewer’s interest to provoke contemplation.
Andrew Mallis
May 2002

Select Bibliography

• Art&Design: Painting in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, David Moos, Ed. London: Academy Group Ltd., 1996
• Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” in New Left Review, no. 146 (July-August 1984)
• Gleik, James. Chaos. New York: Penguin Books, 1988
• Hales, N. Katherine. The Seductions of Cyberspace in Rethinking Technologies, Verena Andermatt Conley, Ed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Pp 173-191.
• Hales, N. Katherine. Narratives of Artificial Life in FutureNatural: nature, science, culture, George Robinson, Ed. New York: Routledge, 1996.
• Kapra, Fritjof. The Tao of Physics. Boston: Shambhala Publications, Inc., 1991
• Mandelbrot B., Benoit. The Fractal Geometry of Nature. New York: Freeman, 1983
• Margulis, Dan. Professional Photoshop: The Classic Guide to Color Correction, 4th Ed. New York: Wiley Publishing, Inc., 2002
• Michael Field and Martin Golubitsky. Symmetry in Chaos. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995

You can download this document in PDF format: Fractals statement(192 KB)