What the Foils?
Foils is the exploration of aleatory human play in algorithmic art.
The project begins as I take an ordinary object — an aluminum foil — and commit it to an analog process of repetitive folding. I then photograph the resulting design, upload it to a workstation, polish it, and add personal signatures to clarify what the piece evokes in me.
In traditional generative art, a human-made parameter within an algorithm curates data in order to generate a work. However, in Foils, the parameters are conversely set by the pliable material, from where the piece emerges as a single result of an infinite probability, whose curation is entrusted to an artist.
Looked at this way, Foils resembles traditional sculpture: each artwork, at first just a piece of foil, is first manually handled and then digitally chiseled through a quasi-generative action by a human, who uses their own judgment in deeming the work complete.
By toying with the object in both physical and digital worlds, I introduce a human playfulness, imbue the material with my own whims, moods, and thoughts, until I consider it to be worthy of display. As a form slowly crystallizes into shape, however, the piece also begins speaking its own language and tells me something. In naming the artwork according to what I see inside — almost like fortune telling from tea leaves — a personal, (sub)conscious element is once again brought into the project.
Each piece in Foils seeks to detect the moment within the individual, the undetectable interstition where a decision changes the work completely; when an uncanny neuron strikes a connection nobody else could see. Every fold and every name records another entry to the history of the piece, the project, and the artist. When a piece is shown to the rest of the world, it is not only the single piece that is at stake, but the entire concept of the project.
The process of Foils repeats the history of technology in art: from a human-made material and machine’s initially functional applications, to the end goal of embracing invention and discovery as an indispensable fact of life. Cavemen eventually used stone to etch on walls — Andy Warhol used lithography to make a statement — we now use metal and computers to generate artworks.
And with each cycle, with each piece, the revolution begins again.
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