In every job I’ve had in the art world - in a gallery, museum, or art advisory - I spent 80% of my time using various software to complete work. Whether it be an archive management software, or an online selling platform, I was surprised that they were so inefficient and unappealing. For something as exciting and interesting as art, everything I was using was incredibly boring.
The sites I visited to look at, research, and study art did not have the same visual or interactive interest as the works they displayed. Even if they were visually appealing, they were also difficult to navigate. Many museum or gallery websites had no character, and did not always have great affordance. On numerous occasions I have had to help artists or clients with websites that they needed to use to share or view art.
The digital space is so important to the accessibility of art and I think in its current state, it sucks!! All I want to do is to make it more beautiful, fun, and easy to use. I want to reimagine how we approach virtual exhibitions, digital archives, artist spaces… how we connect with each other through art.
Coming from an art history background, I didn’t have much formal education of actually creating things, especially not intangible things. I hope this term I can start to build an arsenal of tools to achieve my goal.
I’m especially excited because I have a deep interest in conceptual art. I love the idea of creating something to represent or negate a theoretical idea, or to play with its medium. The limits of a tangible object are not placed on the intangible, so I am eager to see the possibilities of creation.
Henni Alftan Olafur Eliasson’s Uncertain Archive Matthew Wong Machine Girl Eva Hesse Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion Tom Sachs’ (who I do not love) Swiss Passport Office One of the first pieces of code I interacted with was this tearable cloth. I was 12 and had no idea how they achieved what seemed to be such accurate physics. It sparked a deep curiosity but I didn’t bother finding out how to create something like this cloth until recently.
Henni Alftan, Corduory, 2020
I used this ruler to help me figure out where to place shapes. I turned on the auto-complete hint feature because I kept forgetting the order of parameters and it also saved time. Because I learnt code on my own, I feel like my organization is not the best - I am a culprit of messy code. This project was an opportunity for me to work on it since I had to remember what order I put my shapes.
I started with a blue head which also served as a reference point for the other features. Originally, I used an ellipse to create a long oval shape. But I realized the top part of this “head” would stick out from underneath the hair, so I used an arc instead in order to cut off the top part of the head.
The most important!! My bangs. I started with an arc and used “OPEN” as the 5th parameter. Since the hair was black, it was boring to just create one big blob. I utilized stroke colors so that there was some separation between the bangs and the back part of the hair.
With the bangs in place, I added the code for the back hair above the code for the head so that it would display in the correct layer order. I made the same arc shape but larger, and then a quad underneath. I lined up the top width of the quad to the diameter of the arc so that the stroke lines don’t cross over each other.
Each eye shape was created with two arcs, the bottom one shorter than the top so that the eyes had a rounder shape to them. The pupils were just ellipses.
Triangle nose. I used more math than I have in the past 5 years to figure out how to center it.