My Video

My Story

I never thought I’d be an artist. When I was young, art was frivolous. Science was serious, and I was a serious young man. Mom was art. Dad was science. I was a boy with four sisters. I went with Dad. So in college I studied math, physics and computer science. I taught at Rutgers and Vassar. But then, almost by accident, things began to change.  Before we get to that, let’s go back in time.

In eleventh grade, I studied algebra and trigonometry. We used equations, pencil and graph paper to plot parabolas, ellipses, and waves: Choose some x values. Calculate their y values. Mark a dot for each (x,y) pair. Then connect the dots. “Wow! Equations can make pictures.” It was marvelous. I was utterly fascinated. Smitten with love. Nobody told me I was doing art.  

When I arrived at Vassar, I was assigned to teach computer graphics – a field I had never studied. So I gave myself a crash course: Combine the physics of light with the algebra of shape and perspective projection. Encode in a program and then press “Enter”. “Wow! What a surprise!” It was much more than I expected. I fell in love again with my old high school sweetheart. I was still not doing art.

Mom died.  I had to carry on. Art suddenly looked different.  Not frivolous at all. I joined with a sculptor colleague to develop and teach a course in computer animation. I also began to teach courses in media studies. I made some computer-animated movies myself and showed them to a few friends. They encouraged me and here I am.

My Work

I call myself a “computational artist”.  While not commonly used, this term is broad enough to cover the range of works that I make: computer animation; interactive digital media; and generative art.

In my animated and interactive works, I create 3D spaces in virtual reality. I paste images onto the surfaces of the virtual world and provide a means for a viewer to navigate the space to view the images. The resulting work provides an unusual context for viewing the images, while the images add ambience to the virtual space. Two of these works (Interior Fragmentation and Memory Palace) are on this web site, both as animated movies and interactive virtual worlds. 

Generative art can be roughly defined as follows: The artist writes a computer program. The running program generates an image. The code usually has switches and parameters that the programmer / artist can manipulate to obtain a variety of resulting images. Thus generative art comes in families of related works. For this reason, I often arrange my generated images in groups that suggest relationships among members of a family.

I often read and think about mathematics, art and the relation between them. Math has much to offer the visual arts, both as a conceptual framework for imagining new works and as a language of shape, structure and dynamics that can play a role in art criticism.  In my creative work I’ve been exploring combinations of order and disorder: systematic designs mixed with quasi-random shapes; repetitive patterns that are broken; symmetries with flaws. I see the boundary between order and disorder as a source of metaphors for aspects of human experience. 

Generative art is not broadly accepted and valued in the world of visual fine-arts. Critics often say it’s overly precise, rigid, cold and devoid of human elements. I often agree. But I hope to win them over with calculated errors; precise ambiguities; and literal ironies to make generative art with a human face.

Why go to all this trouble?  My art-self (Mom) and my science-self (Dad) never got along very well. I – in the middle – am determined to make them reconcile.

My most recent work is usually on display at the Tivoli Artists Gallery in Tivoli, New York.