Apollo

For as long as I can remember, I have been fascinated by the dynamic interaction of shapes. As a child, I created a game to amuse myself, during which I would etch around household objects such as glasses and mugs, before sitting for hours and framing them against a ruler and pen upon sheets of paper. Much later, this would inform my collection, Glass, Ruler, Pen on fx(hash). Later, I progressed to drawing bunches of dots onto paper, connecting them up to make other shapes, such as diamonds. These experiments in proto-plotter art would in turn lead to my later collections, Gems, and Space Gems. I am not professionally trained, and my work stems from a lifetime of escapism in considering the aesthetic of shapes.

It was around five years ago that I learned how to code in evening classes after school. A couple of years after, I got into the Generative Art scene almost by mistake. After discovering Art Blocks, I couldn't believe that code could produce such art. Tyler Hobb's Fidenza left me questioning how those forms were possible. And in the process of learning how this was possible, I fell in love. I tried to create my own works, experimented with code, and felt the satisfaction of having people collect what I'd made. More specifically, I fell in love with the values and creative possibilities of what I believe is the defining, revolutionary, artistic movement of our age. I began to work late into the night. I looked into flow fields and perlin noise. I began to iterate upon the traditional art movements that I read about. To refresh, refresh, refresh...

Apollo represents the culmination of perhaps a year of work, in which my process accelerated exponentially; alterations in single layers of code producing whole new algorithms. An earlier progenitor for this new endeavour arrived with the completion this summer of my collection, Less Mess, Much Less…, again on (fx)hash. This abstract organisation of shapes produced wonderful printed textures but, compositionally, it wasn't groundbreaking. I wanted to take this direction further; to innovate and expand the boundaries of what an algorithm can create. So I researched abstract art, Cubism, Pointillism, and I was drawn time and time again to both the circular formation at the heart of Awareness, by Robert Delauney, and the bold colour contrasts in the sub-divided concentric circles in Rythme by his wife Sonia Delauney.

I recognised my own childlike wonder at the mystical properties of the circle in its intersections; its interplay of colours and shape. I took this amorphic concept and tried to emulate it in code. It took two or three months, and I was on the point of capitulating- it had stopped being fun. Then I went back, and one night made several breakthroughs. My code is very 'messy', but I'm driven by the outputs foremost; I found a simple trick that made the code run and enact the intersections I'd desired. What should I do with it? As I was always drawn to circles, I set them forefront, adding occasional shapes in orbit around them. But the outputs hadn't strayed far from that initial inspiration of Awareness by Delaunay, with its notion of a circle divided into four with a vertical and a horizontal line.

After this, I thought, 'OK, I have replicated their work- that's not that cool. How can I invent?'. Originally submitted to gm.studio as Digital Orphism, I worked on iterating and varying these key traits of the project in consultation with the curation team. I was keen to move away from this initial influence of the Delaunays, and for a better definition of the ethos behind the project. gm.studio founder, Cyphr, suggested the title Apollo after the poet Apollinaire who coined 'Orphism'. By the 1910s, Orpheus had come to symbolise the embodiment of the artistic process. Just as he was able to play his lyre so beautifully that he could make people - and even rocks- weep and sing, so the act of painting itself could be seen as an instrument. Thus with art, we can engage the mysteries of our inner experiences with the pure aesthetic emotions of colour and form. I resonated deeply with this, remembering my childhood games of escape and wonder at geometric shapes.

But it was Apollo, (god of the circular Sun) who was said to have given Orpheus his lyre. And the Apollonian Principle of order, balance and aesthestic pleasure is a great metaphor for our own attempts to control using coding algorithms; the new geometric order I have attempted to impose upon this collection. My work still focused upon the circles, although I began thinking about how the layout of other shapes might serve to emphasise them. It seems to me profoundly human that we are drawn to circles as portals to other places: to eyes as the windows to the soul; to stars, moons and planets. Just as Apollo's temple at Delphi was known as the 'navel of the world', I worked on 3D shading effects in which half a circle appears flat, and the half domes outwards from the page. I also worked more on the tiny pixel shapes that would render an almost granular texture, and fields of negative space.