Inspiration: Pascal Dombis

Inspiration:

Pascal Dombis is a digital artist who has been working with computers and algorithms to create simple repetitive forms and designs. He works and lives in France. The artist uses the paradoxical coexistence to shape destructing structures and build up irrational environments and then projects them on different surfaces such as paintings on the wall or other screens. As he articulates: “Today’s world strikes me as a place where orderly control and chaotic aleatory forces coexist. As an artist, I exploit this paradoxical coexistence to shape destructuring structures and develop irrational environments.”

In his interview with Danielle Delouche (curator, 2005) he describes his interest in complexity and using lines and forms. He says that he started to get involved with “complexity” when I began to wonder about significance of digital tools in artistic works. I studied programming, algorithmic and many other computer language systems he says. He eventually started to work on creating those repetitive shapes and generate those basic and at the same time full of activity environments. He also states that he finds those irritations so similar to human thoughts and the way that human brain works. “The irrational comes from the excessive repetition of simple processes. Such an activity is very similar to that of human thought. A human brain is actually made of neurons and neurons, in turn, are made of microtubulae. These tubulae work as automated cellular agents with an algorithmic mode of functioning. Derived from medieval arithmetics, an algorithm has been understood since the nineteenth century to be “a series of explicit operating rules”, in other words, it is a set of instructions designed to achieve something, for instance “Drawing a segment of a straight line 10 times and changing its orientation and dimension after each inscription”. A computer is the ideal tool to execute an algorithm ; as a matter of fact, it is the only thing it can do. By executing the operation “drawing a segment of a straight line 10 times and changing its orientation and dimension after each inscription”, one comes to a structure visibly made of 10 straight lines. Yet, when repeated one million times, the same operation does not produce one million straight lines but an altogether different environment in which the mere notion of ’straight line’ disappears to let other signs emerge.”

http://dombis.com/

 

 

Cinema created movement-images and images in movement. When used artistically, the new technologies create fractals, rhizomes and the movements of and in the image. We have gone from the multiple facets of a mirrored reality to an epidermis of layered images. A panoptic of the interface and the artefact in which curved topologies can emerge from what seems to be a geometrically ordered outer skin, in a minimalist Baroque all of structural fluidity and infinite visual pathways. Between Alice through the looking-glass and Icarus soaring across infinite skies, the modernist monochrome makes a sudden reappearance in works consisting of multiple digital monochromes piled on top of one another to create fleshless luminous "post-digital mirrors". But in this new "gaze craze" it is distance which allows you to attain a kind of indeterminateness without limits, a fourth dimension which opens onto an aesthetics of ephemeral and stratified temporality.

"Line_Wave" is a video installation composed of 2 lenticular-laminated screens that display generative proliferation of ten thousands of random color lines. During the time, the lines move with a smooth, wavelike motion. Because of the roughness of the lenticular materials, the wave form are not properly displayed and the 'staircase' effects are magnified, resulting in "jaggies" proliferation. And what should be curve shapes are then rendered in line segments or points.

This piece play with simple binary opposition, line and curve, low tech and high tech ...
 

Spin, 2006
Interactive video installation with 1 videoprojector, Video software: Claude Micheli, Electronic: Sylvain Belot
Spin is a digital generative process based on the endless depiction of concentric proliferation of thousands of rotating circles that composes hypnotic structures. The more they spin, the more they multiply and at a certain point, becomes more and more chaotic and finally ends up into a void image. Then another proliferation cycle of spinning circles starts again. This loop process is potentiality endless. Pascal Dombis moves the aesthetic research of rotating circles, including research by Marcel Duchamp at the first part of the XXth century, into a new digital computer space, and focuses his attention on a problem of how we can use algorithmic principles of generative art to make visual environments that can represent such phenomenon as vertigo, vortex or infinitude.