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New Work
Binary Portraits are portraits of my friends and colleagues. Each person is represented as a radial pattern shaped by the binary values of the letters in the subject’s name. They are drawn using an algorithm written in the programming language Processing to create dense, radial, line drawings in which the size and repetition of shapes is defined by a series of numbers. While these drawings do not attempt to represent an individual’s physical features, they are unique expressions of each name. They serve as accurate, if not useful, renderings of their subjects.
Spinning in the Dust and The Nonsense Stuff of It are animations based on poems by physicist Rebecca Elson and poet Robert Browning respectively. Using a web crawler written for the project by Nolan Brubaker, I began a search for each poem at gawker.com and wandered, link by link, through the Internet until each word in the poem was found within texts published by others on blogs and websites. These words are represented in the animations as a pattern defined by the number of links on the page where each word is found, the number of attempts the web crawler made to find the word, and the geographical distance between the servers where each website is hosted. These shapes change and grow as each word is presented in sequence. Each animation is designed to reflect some of the character of the original works while it also charts the search for these poems in cyberspace.