My answers for Print Center's New Voices program
These are answers submitted for the Print Center's New Voices program, shared publicly to celebrate the work and encourage serendipity through public discourse about art.
1. How is printmaking incorporated in your work? Why is printmaking, both as process and concept, a part of your artistic practice?
Printmaking functions as dialogue between tools, materials, and their emergent interactions. Computer coding anchors the artistic approach, and both mediums share a fundamental requirement: precise, step-by-step instructions capable of infinite reproduction. However, digital systems generate identical outputs through perfect grids and clean geometry, while printmaking navigates physical material unpredictability where precision dissolves into something unexpected.
When designs transfer via plotting machine, pen skips create rendering gaps. When printed using risograph, uneven layer application and translucent ink combinations produce effects impossible to achieve through screens.
The craft involves anticipating and directing these behaviors. The same setup steps yield unique pieces—a meditative, responsive engagement where realignment, re-inking, and shifting happen throughout. Where code operates mechanically, printmaking creates space for discovering each process's distinct material qualities.
Physical ritual matters: repetitive motions, deliberate preparation, gradual mark accumulation. Printmaking enforces its own temporal pace, enabling contemplation that digital tools alone cannot provide. Within a landscape where instant algorithmic image generation dominates, this process emphasizes slowness, chance, and surprise—fundamentally collaborative between humans, tools, and materials.
2. Select one work from your application materials and walk us through how it was made
Tracing Harmony draws inspiration from the harmonograph—a nineteenth-century device employing pendulums to generate geometric forms from single continuous lines.
The process initiates with digital harmonograph simulation. An algorithm models drawing motion while randomly selecting parameters (duration, pendulum quantity, frequencies) to generate thousands of potential variations—core generative art techniques. The code functions as a system producing numerous unique outputs, each representing the machine's combinational decisions.
The artist occupies dual roles: curator and translator. Curation involves selecting algorithmic outputs, revealing specific qualities, gradually establishing an evolving visual language. Translation means feeding instructions to pen plotters for additional interpretation. The plotter introduces its own chance operations. In this piece, continuous curves challenge mechanical limits, producing glitch aesthetics. These "errors" create textural artifacts through material resistance, becoming essential to the work's character.
Drawing from Sol LeWitt's instruction-based Wall Drawings philosophy, each stage represents collaborative space. Algorithm provides initial instructions, computer interprets digitally, plotter performs final physical interpretation. Like LeWitt's pieces executed by different hands, each layer contributes distinctive voice. This translation between physical machines, digital simulation, and physical manifestation grounds the practice. Variation accumulation documents collaboration, while the series functions as ongoing visual conversation.
3. How does your work engage with the curator's guiding theme?
The work emerges from software engineering background, recognizing that systems embody their creators' assumptions. Most systems pursue consensus, smoothing variation and rewarding conformity. The question becomes: what if systems elevated multiple viewpoints simultaneously? "Edge cases" represent unconsidered perspectives.
Rather than designing traditional control-optimized systems, the approach pursues pluralistic systems remaining fluid, incorporating diverse viewpoints throughout development. Visual systems employ harmonious parameter variation—frequency ranges, color palettes, line weights. Processes amplify translation losses as digital becomes physical and vice-versa. Rather than erasing material resistance moments, the unique grain of each machine and material receives emphasis, allowing each collaborator's voice distinction.
Each piece teaches viewers recognizing relationships between individual elements and collective patterns. Simple shapes transform into complex designs through variation. Making visible typically hidden system creation processes—code, machine movements, material encounters—enables transparency and access, demonstrating how people function simultaneously as system products and potential system-makers.
Additional Works
