Art and Technology
A Creative Process for the Dolby Gallery
I never wanted to be a technical artist; It sort of just happened. I backed into it, one step at a time. Technical exercises were a way to have another tool in the toolbox. Programming was something I picked up to fuel my creativity. Understanding how something works is useful if your going to break it and put it back together again.
I grew up not overly strong in one subject or another at school, but balanced many different areas of study — a generalist as they say. I learned to play an instrument, to render drawings in pencil, how to juggle a soccer ball, and the technical structure of an algebraic equation. My theory for creativity relies on having an open system where disparate ideas come together for a sum greater than its parts. In other words, it’s a 3 step process: Copy, Transform, Combine.
One of the challenges in the commercial design world we occasionally encounter is a contradiction of ideas. We may be asked for things such as “We want it epic yet intimate”, or “It should be dark but also light.” As designers, we scoff and think “How is this possible, it can’t be both?!” Yet it’s these types of challenges I thrive on most. They offer an opportunity for combining, changing, and remixing.
Leviathan was invited to submit a unique work of art for the Dolby Gallery last March. I served as the Creative Director, Visual Artist, and Lead Programmer. (If you haven’t seen it, check it here). Their mission was to blend “Art and Technology”. I proposed a data visualization, and after some back and forth, landed on “color” as the subject. Color was perfect because it can be described both technically and artistically.
I have been working with color data visualizations for sometime without realizing it. Some applications I use, such as Houdini, have an intermediate form of data that can use colors to represent things such vectors or 3D coordinates. These techniques are often used in visual effects to calculate things like motion blur. Another technique is called pixel packing. A simple way to explain it is XYZ coordinates can be represented as RGB colors. This was the Rosetta Stone that served as the foundation for the Dolby Metamorphosis data visualization.
In the end I used a more elaborate mathematical equation, ICtCp. It’s one that Dolby uses in their technology to produce a wider gamut of colors. I’m not a mathematician and for the most part can I barely understand this equation. But I know enough to know where the = sign needs to go and reverse engineer it. It goes to show what an artist can do when hacking things for purposes other than what they were intended for.
Beyond “color”, it needed more of a storyline so I chose to analyze color from past works of art. In a way it was an homage to my youth wandering the halls of museums staring at masterpieces. I wondered what makes these things so special I could stop and gaze at them for hours on end? Many times it was simply the color.
If this installation had only been a simple data visualization, it may have stopped short of serving its second purpose — presenting data in a beautiful, artistic way. It needed to entertain and mesmerize the audience. It needed to be something you could gaze at for awhile. Given that I had this equation that broke down color into space, I figured I could use that somehow. Red pixels organized in one area, and yellow in another. It created a kind of 3D painters pallet. I added artistic parameters to shape this process like a potter at the wheel throwing clay.
I battled with this, however. How much to alter the pure path of the data? Would it still be “true” if there were artistic parameters? It was a process of adding and removing chaos and order to find the balance. In the end you’ll know it’s right after struggling with it for a while, then you show it off to other people and they feel something for it too. Some people call this tapping into your state of “flow”.
The main software I used was a real-time program called TouchDesigner. Most of the decisions could be made and iterated over rapidly without any render time. It is essential to do this, and use workflows that maximize the number of iterations possible. Each iteration loop uncovers a more accurate version of itself. The main gallery video was 9K resolution, 60FPS, and about 12 minutes long which is pretty impressive at the time it was created. It would run on a single computer with a single GPU and could create an infinite amount of variation for days or months.
I’ve always found the best ideas come from combining two or more things. The invitation by Dolby to create a unique visualization that blends both Art and Technology was no different. The creative solution is one that inspires an audience and is able to defy the conventional. That which cannot be easily defined or described gets people talking. I want to continue the conversation with what I create.
Special thanks to: Amanda Schneider, Joel Corelitz, David Braun, Adam Berg, Brittany Maddock, Bill Galusha, Andrew Butterworth, Anthony Malagutti, Chad Hutson, Jason White, Gina Giambalvo and Jessica Grzegorski.
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