Hommage a Baertling

From Rhizome Artbase
Jimpalt
2008
Description

Hommage a Baertling is a computer program that creates pictures based on the work of the Swedish artist Olle Baertling. The program creates hundreds of pictures per minute and stores them in PDF format.

Rhizome staff
2021

The art-piece is a computer program that creates and recreates pictures of the Swedish artist Olle Baertling. Olle Bærtling (1911-81) is one of the few Nordic artists of the second half of the 20th century who made a name for himself internationally. Initially inspired by the Concretists, he developed a style of his own with bright colors in triangular shapes, which, in his later works, appear to move out of the frames into the infinity of space, which has become the distinguishing characteristic of Bærtling.
I have been writing a computer program that creates new pictures that tries to recreate the work of Baertling. The code uses randomness to make every picture unique and different based on the work of Baertling. The program works fast and creates hundreds of pictures a minute and store them in PDF format that archives in a database. After some hours the program has created a million pictures and they are all are different from each other. The program is visual and you see the process when the program creates pictures in a pulsating and rapid move.
It could be seen as the art worlds Deep Blue, the computer that won against the world champion in chess, Kasparov.
The art piece is a comment on a society where productivity, effectiveness and profitability is keywords and where people get replaced by computers at work. How will the computerized world affect art? Will painting be replaced by code or computer or just be a tool for creating?
This art piece could be seen as a humoristic comment, but it also raises questions that we need to ask ourselves when our world is chaining and people live their life’s in front of computer screens.
The art piece could also be seen as a big experiment where I try to find the perfect picture in a database of millions of pictures. In the context of millions of pictures and the fact that a computer created the work the art pieces seems to get empty and pointless like something is missing..
The projects was also made into an artistbook.

Jimpalt
13 August 2009
Metadata
Variant History
outside link
2008
Jimpalt