Net Art research pt II: complexification.net
Complexification is a showcase for the works of Jared Tarbell, and describes itself as a “gallery of computation” filled with “generative artefacts”. This site has some of the best examples of generative art (mainly built with Processing) which is something I find totally fascinating, as you may have guessed from some of my previous posts.
The works here aren’t just technical exercises; despite being essentially a collection of fairly advanced software, each of them has a striking beauty about it, with a unified colour palette linking them into a single body of work. They exhibit a wonderful sketchiness, and sometimes a painterly quality. Substrate is like if Mondrian used watercolours and smoked crack; Stitches evokes textures of woven cloth; Offspring visualises the family tree of a colony of robots. Each of the pieces shown here is unique and fantastic, and collectively form a benchmark against which a lot of generative art today is measured against. For me, generative systems like the ones used here provide the most exciting new paradigm for artists working in “new media” (I hate that term).
If you’re into this sort of thing its worth checking out Matt Pearson’s 100 Abandoned Artworks which has some cool stuff in a similar, albeit less developed form. I was going to look at it in a later post but it’s a bit too similar to Complexification, I think.