Nikzad Arabshahi is an interdisciplinary artist based in The Hague Netherlands, working in the fields of painting, productive arts, and new media. Nikzad has been working professionally since 2000 and has exhibited several of his works in art exhibitions, theater performances, and multimedia arrangements around the world.
In the fifth week of the group exhibition “Glitch; Pixel Language » Platform 101 Arabshahi glitch video titled” Autogenesis “is displayed in the space -1 Bavan Gallery. In his artwork statement, Arabshahi said more about the concept of autogenesis:
Autogenesis is a type of generative art project in which the audience experiences the modeled system of the artist’s mind and a range of variations among the three situations (order, complexity, and disorder) of visual and audio artwork.
To design the algorithms of the Autogenesis core system, the data from the Artist’s physical and mental patterns while painting and drawing are utilized and a simulator model of his method is generated by automatic coding software. Therefore, what is depicted before the observer is the result of a generative system creating the final image and terminal sound autonomously in real-time
To shed more light on how Autogenesis is working, first of all, we shall have a review of the general definition of Generative Art. A field of art in which the artist applies a system to produce artwork is called “Generative Art”. The system can be an integration of natural language, computer programming, or other related innovative mechanisms that are able to render a level of autonomy in part or in the whole fabrication process of the artwork. Generative Art can be Hi-tech or non-high-tech, yet the core system needs to be designed in a way to be able to manage the terminal work autonomously.
As a result, generative art refers to how the core system is working and the creation process of the artwork. Thus, to discover its link with its production reasons and understanding its content, initially, we must investigate system producer algorithms; because despite the fact that the core system is constantly hidden, it is the fundamental and constitutive part of the final artwork.
Autogenesis central system is a complex system. To design the algorithms, an analysis was done on signals from hands’ physical behavior, joints movements, and brain waves frequencies of the artist while painting. The data is recorded by multiple sensors and then assimilated with another algorithm which is able to reconstruct the elements of the artist’s visual language and model their combination method.
The end result of this research is a combination of patterns for generating information by which designing the final Data Simulator Engine for the genesis of the artwork becomes feasible. This Data Simulator Engine plays the role of the central system intelligence.
By and large, complex systems consist of a series of parts and components interacting with their kind and other corresponding and contiguous components. These inner interactions make the system capable of organizing itself needless of an external controlling and managing agent. For that reason, such systems are also called “self-organizing”. To illustrate complex systems, the human brain can be used as an instance of a typical complex system as biologists describe it and psychoanalysts explain it in their research findings.
Haunting cycle, animals populations within an ecosystem, genes outdoing one another yielding in species evolution, empires rising and falling, cultures forming and developing and the like all entail various parts and components such as cells, chromosomes, citizens, etc. which reach a consistent structure and shape over time by interacting with other homogenous and neighboring components.
The Autogenesis core system is created by computer generative programming and just as in the brain example above, it has a large collection of components and interacts with each other 30 times per second. Each of these components includes constituents and convert orders from central intelligence into particular operations and add the properties of the operations to the main network.
This network consists of hundreds of components and because there are a considerable number of non-linear variables in each of these components, no identical pattern as the ones before is generated. The output operation of this dynamic system is a series of visual interminable signals turning into an image with a continuous and unrepeatable composition by a Real-time Rendering Engine.
The visual concept of this artwork is in the continuum of the artist’s previous works and intertwined with painting, drawing, and sound design. Instead of being a constant image as one of “moment” and a possibility among artist’s endless mental possibilities, in this procedure, the artwork is a visual and audio improvisation synthesizing “visual-Sound” variable possibilities and generating a consecutive combination of them. In this situation, the artwork has no definite start point and nor can be an endpoint put to it.
Not a moment before is recorded anywhere but in the viewer’s memory and neither a moment afterward is predictable. To that end, it can be stated that the artwork is more of a reflection of the artist’s thought mirroring on the wall of the pavilion than merely an objective piece of art. The point is to experience coexisting with dynamic artwork and thinking of a world of possibilities of Sounds and images that being created at any moment in front of viewers.
Glitch Video Art Autogenesis Nikzad Arabshahi in group exhibition Glitch; pixel language curated by Mohammad Ali Famori and Sadegh Majlesi will continue to be displayed in the space -1 Bavan Gallery in Tehran until Thursday, January 28, 2021.
