Abstracts - Simon Ingram

Title: Materialist practice in painting and self organising systems
Simon Ingram
Doctoral Student
Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland

A new kind of science^[1] has emerged that enacts the kind of complex patterning found in nature within the computational environment. Specific sets of simple individual rules when run on a grid many times present complex emergent phenomena that are not immediately predictable and which show signs of randomness. Two such dynamical systems are cellular automata and Langton's Ant. The level of self-reflexivity, and recursive behaviour that helps generate the conditions for such patterning is reminiscent of some materialist practices in painting over the last 100 or so years. So too are some of the aims of this new kind of science. There is a sort of reverse engineering at work in both cases, an attempt to build machines that are less representations of things in the world than things in their own right.

In this paper there will be a presentation of relevant images and an unpacking and comparison of ideas relating to a specific class of dynamical systems and materialist painting practice.

[1] Stephen Wolfram, A New Kind of Science, Wolfram Media Inc 2002

Simon Ingram - Biography

Simon Ingram is a doctoral student at Elam School of Fine Arts. He is chiefly concerned with the relationship between industrial/digital technology and painting. This concern has led him to elaborate machines within painting, and painting as machine. He exhibits his work often in Australia and New Zealand.

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