ART Habens Byron Rich
People really believe that the machine is its own entity , and that to us , is more than a bit frightening .
We are working ( slowly ) on ideas for a new iteration that really ups the creepy factor . I ’ m not going to explain it yet , but hopefully it will happen soon .
While engaging with the ongoing debate surrounding copyright restrictions , Paint-By- Numbers also offers an opportunity to rethink about ever growing informationfocused techno-sphere and what actually could be hidden between an apparently ubiquitous determinism . In particular , you seem to highlight the creative potential of aleatory process in the construction of meaning . While walking our readers in performative aspect of this work , would you like to shed a light about the role of randomness in Paint-By-Numbers and in your approach in general ? In particular , do you think that chance could play a creative role ?
Oh , Paint-by-Numbers . I think it needs a ton of work , and it ’ s another piece that I ’ m revisiting and changing quite drastically . I think in its current stage it is barely scratching the surface of its potential .
I was walking down a corridor during grad school and saw all this work on the walls , and it all seemed so formulaic , which it was , as it was undergrad work based on strict criteria . I began to ponder whether or not a computer could randomly produce those pieces simply by generating colors and assigning them to pixels . The old thousand monkeys in a room , eventually they ’ ll write Shakespeare or some such thing . I didn ’ t know how to approach it , so I asked my studio mate , Bobby Gryzynger , and he threw out some ideas on how it could come about . After a few days he had put together this rather simple processing sketch that became PBN .
Like APS , a person fundamentally designs the system and has and it has an enormous
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