Computational Constructs
Sean Clark, hosted by Nick Lambert

Summary

Sean Clark, chair of the Computer Arts Society, presents “Computational Constructs,” a new body of rule-based generative work he calls “reconstructivist.” He explains how his practice, rooted in 1990s new-media art and systems-art influences, now centres on self-organising digital systems that sort a fixed palette of colours by hue, saturation and lightness into simple geometric forms such as circles, spirals and grids. Each work is a window into a single generative system that constantly swaps elements between subsystems and re-sorts itself, never reaching a static equilibrium. Clark is interested in “recoverability” — the idea that a viewer can eventually work out the rules governing the image — and he extends the project from still prints to live animations and sonification, where colour data becomes melodic and drone-like sound. He proposes reconstructivism as a genre of digital art in which systems follow a pattern, reach a homeostatic state, are disrupted by external inputs and reorganise, forming ecologies of connected works across time and space. The talk ends with plans for a live performance using sixteen interacting systems and a discussion with the audience about randomness, music, authorship and whether the code, the running system or the individual print is the true artwork.

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