The new media art world is starting to gain some Momentum as a respected art form, as the ripple effect of the digital age can be felt in even the most deeply buried of traditional art mediums. The canvas is being replaced by a programming environment. Paints are now composed of classes and subroutines. The brush is now an interactive link between the viewer and the art work, forming an intimate and infintely unique experience.

Inherent in this link is also an accessibility factor. While mainly those trained or interested enough in the arts can appreciate the free-form expression behind Pollock’s gestural paintings, or recognize the social tensions that surrounded the Dada movement, most people are immediately drawn into an interactive installation. Put together some custom programming code, a camera and a projector and you can allow people to create their own gestural paintings — allow them to feel the freedom of expression that was key to Pollock’s paintings and representative of a young America that was developing her own voice. Throw together some code to interact with the Flickr API to return a collage of found images based on a submitted word or phrase — you now have a digital version of Duchamp’s “Readymades” where the value of the piece lies not in its aesthetic merit, but in the perceived relationship between the idea and the image.

I’m mostly interested in developing generative art pieces that either respond to changes in its own environment, respond to external stimuli collected from a personal “network”, or some combination thereof. I believe it would be interesting to create a visualization of all of the little bits of external data that we are bombarded with all day. Everything from the position of the sun in the sky, to how many lights are on in the house, to the temperature in a certain room can be collected and displayed in an interwoven visualization. This stimuli may even come from miles away via a networked data device. A unique pattern may emerge when, for example, a parent arrives home from work.

That’s all I have to say now. I hope to continue this discussion with you later. I may even be so inclined to share my ideas regarding a certain banana detector.