ART Habens
Byron Rich
People really believe that the machine is its own entity, and that to us, is more than a bit frightening. We are working (slowly) on ideas for a new iteration that really ups the creepy factor. I’m not going to explain it yet, but hopefully it will happen soon. While engaging with the ongoing debate surrounding copyright restrictions, Paint-ByNumbers also offers an opportunity to rethink about ever growing informationfocused techno-sphere and what actually could be hidden between an apparently ubiquitous determinism. In particular, you seem to highlight the creative potential of aleatory process in the construction of meaning. While walking our readers in performative aspect of this work, would you like to shed a light about the role of randomness in Paint-By-Numbers and in your approach in general? In particular, do you think that chance could play a creative role?
Oh, Paint-by-Numbers. I think it needs a ton of work, and it’s another piece that I’m revisiting and changing quite drastically. I think in its current stage it is barely scratching the surface of its potential. I was walking down a corridor during grad school and saw all this work on the walls, and it all seemed so formulaic, which it was, as it was undergrad work based on strict criteria. I began to ponder whether or not a computer could randomly produce those pieces simply by generating colors and assigning them to pixels. The old thousand monkeys in a room, eventually they’ll write Shakespeare or some such thing. I didn’t know how to approach it, so I asked my studio mate, Bobby Gryzynger, and he threw out some ideas on how it could come about. After a few days he had put together this rather simple processing sketch that became PBN. Like APS, a person fundamentally designs the system and has and it has an enormous
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