Art

I made this image the old-fashioned way: by hand on a Nokia 700 internet tablet. I made a long series of similar images. I wanted it to communicate some very specific concepts to the viewer, and I was once very coy about explaining those concepts.

At this point, I think the ability of art to convey abstract concepts is very limited relative to language, so I'll just explain it. If you want to view the series as originally conceived, with limited explanation, you can see it here.


I wanted to make art using as few of the elements of visual art as possible. To that end, the only artistic decision in these pieces is whether a pixel will be black or white. The lines and shapes of the piece are a question of scale, just the aggregate of very small decisions. With that limitation, I tried to make art that reflected the shapes of light and dark that you see in the natural world. Not the light itself, just the shape of light and dark. I also wanted the image to attract the eye, but not to any specific area of the image, so that the eye would tend to wander over the image.


The Nokia tablet images were only black and white, so the lines looked a bit jagged. I took those bitmaps and traced them in Inscape to smooth the lines. Technically, this goes against the concept, since the lines are smoothed by adding grays between white and black. The eye still percieves it as black and white, though, so I decided it wasn't cheating. Below is the original image for comparison.