Andre SC @ Upgrade! Joburg

Christo Doherty writes lyrical about Andre’s performance (via atjoburg):

The featured artist at this month’s Upgrade! at Wits Digital Arts was Andre SC (André S Clements), a new media manipulator and self-confessed “pixel maniac” who has recently begun exploring an approach to image processing which he calls “post-digital abstraction”.

_{André Clements at the Digital Soiree/Upgrade . . . . and, “Andre SC”- self-portrait as post digital abstraction.}

Andre studied design at Pretoria University and graduated with a BA degree in 1995. Since then he has worked as a designer, corporate consultant, and experimental artist. Over this period he has managed to find time for further studies in Computer Science and Psychology, and indeed several psychological concepts inform his thinking about art and technology. Most recently he has been lecturing in Media Design Technology at a local commercial college and also acts as web-editor/developer for David Krut the fine art publishers. He keeps his own blog at www.pixelplexus.co.za.

A love of abstraction runs through all his works. The different phases of his work are characterised by the different technical approaches he has developed towards his subject matter. “Being is not an exact thing” for André; and abstraction is a way of exploring the fluid and incomplete nature of visual experience, Most of his raw images are harvested from the web, using different search techniques; but his most recent works are based on more focused samples, frequently drawing on images created by other South African artists. “Untitled Kentridge ” started with fifty Kentridge prints superimposed and then mathematically averaged. Taking the process further, André ended up with an image created from 192 Kentridge prints. (Below). It is typical of André’s ethical approach towards image appropriation that after he had completed the series he phoned up the artist himself to ask his permission to make the images public. Kentridge kindly agreed but requested an artist’s proof of the print for his own collection.

André also revealed that he lost all his pre-prepared material the previous evening when his laptop crashed, and had worked through the night to put another presentation together. As he started his presentation, his qualities of rigour/obsessiveness and playfulness/control became apparent. As suggested by the title of his presentation, “drawing the pixel curtain”, André’s aesthetic is founded on the smallest subdivision of the digital image. Many of the algorithms that he has constructed for his imaging processes engage at the pixel level.

André had gone to great lengths to prepare the venue for his presentation. Assisted by one of his MDT students, he rigged display lines along the walls of the room and hung a temporary exhibition of his lamda prints around the room. After publishing to the web, printing, specifically lambda printing, is his major output. Most of his digital processing concludes with a series of lambda prints, several of which were displayed at the soiree. André describes his relationship with the lamda technology as a “love affair” because of the brilliant colours and edge-to-edge precision which is possible with the laser technology.

Some of the earliest work which André discussed was inspired by his interest in the relationship between the human form (specifically the naked female form) and automated techniques of representation. For him, these works seek to create “a bridge between the very abstract and the very intimate”. The difficulty of finding live models led him to use the web as a source of raw images. Typical works from this period begin with a Google image search and then use algorithms to process the collected images into a single composite abstraction such as in “Porn Princess” (below).

A chance encounter with curator Gordon Froud let to an invitation to participate in the “Porn Again” group exhibition at Merely Mortal gallery in Craighall. Froud’s 2005 exhibition gathered together a range of works by artists examining the presence of the erotic and the pornographic in contemporary fine art in South Africa. The experience of the exhibition stimulated AC’s curiosity about the dynamics of the local art scene and pushed his tendency towards abstraction even further. His next phase of work made use of algorithms that upsized web images to 400 dpi and further. By now, AC’s style of production was taking characteristic form. Images are collected and subjected to various pre-processing. The actual abstraction is a process that can take between 5 – 6 hours. A “continuous dance”, as André describes it, between himself, the images and the computer.

More recently, André has encountered Nathaniel Stern’s Compressionism and was excited by the American artist’s “hacking of conventional recording technology “, such as scanners, in order to create new kinds of imagery. André simply used this desktop scanner and experimented with his own “compressionist” images, moving objects across the plate in synchronisation with the progress of the scanner. Still life reminiscent of synthetic cubism and even lighter fluid fires on the scanner plate were all grist for his experiments with the form.

Finally, André briefly introduced his most recent work, a generative web-based project entitled “netVerse”.
A simple interface allows users to play with a stream of falling words which can be clicked and arranged into poetic arrangements much like fridge magnet poetry. The distinctive aspect of the interface is that it records each decision made by the user and then displays the additions for the next user. At this stage over 3500 words have been placed on the system and André plans to add more computational intelligence to the application to control the fall of words.