Methodology & Process
The origin or source material for Avatamsaka comes from a low-resolution copy of a film produced by the Jam Handy Corporation for the 1958 Brussels World Fair that I had downloaded some years back from the Internet Archive based in San Francisco. The film was clearly a promotional piece paid for by Chevrolet to boost and promulgate American design, production and other modernist aspects of material culture. In this promo film, we see Madison Avenue, buttoned-down creative types in posed, design discussions and workshop conferences enacted amidst all sorts of bright new commodities found in the ideal, stylish home, business, and social environments of late 1950’s America. Everything is presented in that breathless celebratory ambience and upbeat fashion that became almost de rigeur in advertising trends during the height of the Cold War. I, in fact, was ten years old when this film was produced so everything looks eerily familiar to me.
The film, entitled “American Look,” was a point of departure for Avatamsaka as I utilized the document in a visual strategy designed to explore the potential for radical digital transformations of base materials. A main objective was to transmute shape, form, and color, provided by simple video images, into something much more complex and enigmatic. In a certain way, “American Look,” became the mud that the lotus (Avatamsaka) would grow from. The original, low-resolution video was first of all brought to a high-definition standard. Colors were modified, and most importantly, a variety of fractal generation filters were used to map the transformed, original surfaces seen in the film on to a kind of liquid, metamorphic flow sequence that I designated, for my own purposes, a “mercury process.” This digital video process is a by-product of decades long research performed in the field of fluid dynamics and is clearly subject to the oft quoted “ sensitive dependence on initial conditions”. This is often referred to in studies of chaos theory as the “butterfly effect”, where a slight modification at one point in a deterministic nonlinear system may bring about vastly modified results at a much later stage. After I had completed a number of passes with the material, I began to layer and composite these new generations, one over another, employing an amendable array of subtle variations to refine and manipulate their interactions. This methodology allowed for the spontaneous and random growth of not only new forms, but also new colors and color combinations that did not exist in the original film. At this point, the materials seemed to be truly talking back to me. Historically, in my work of close to thirty years, my practice was such that I might set conditions and parameters using both analogue and binary processes which would then result in expected or at times unanticipated imagery, but here in fact, with Avatamsaka, the conditions were initially registered, set in progress and then completely informed and driven by the unpredictable and mysterious workings of chaos over time and virtual space.
The film, entitled “American Look,” was a point of departure for Avatamsaka as I utilized the document in a visual strategy designed to explore the potential for radical digital transformations of base materials. A main objective was to transmute shape, form, and color, provided by simple video images, into something much more complex and enigmatic. In a certain way, “American Look,” became the mud that the lotus (Avatamsaka) would grow from. The original, low-resolution video was first of all brought to a high-definition standard. Colors were modified, and most importantly, a variety of fractal generation filters were used to map the transformed, original surfaces seen in the film on to a kind of liquid, metamorphic flow sequence that I designated, for my own purposes, a “mercury process.” This digital video process is a by-product of decades long research performed in the field of fluid dynamics and is clearly subject to the oft quoted “ sensitive dependence on initial conditions”. This is often referred to in studies of chaos theory as the “butterfly effect”, where a slight modification at one point in a deterministic nonlinear system may bring about vastly modified results at a much later stage. After I had completed a number of passes with the material, I began to layer and composite these new generations, one over another, employing an amendable array of subtle variations to refine and manipulate their interactions. This methodology allowed for the spontaneous and random growth of not only new forms, but also new colors and color combinations that did not exist in the original film. At this point, the materials seemed to be truly talking back to me. Historically, in my work of close to thirty years, my practice was such that I might set conditions and parameters using both analogue and binary processes which would then result in expected or at times unanticipated imagery, but here in fact, with Avatamsaka, the conditions were initially registered, set in progress and then completely informed and driven by the unpredictable and mysterious workings of chaos over time and virtual space.
