Collection: Occubot
Artist’s Statement: I had been trying to teach Nguyn to scribble like a kid, a talented, angry kid – or maybe an incredibly pissed-off chain-smoking alcoholic kid – which was quite entertaining – imagine trying to quantify the rules of abstract expressionism,with a touch of cubism, fauvery, surrealism and just a pinch of italian futurism or something doomed and savagely utopian like that. Into this meditation came news of the Occupy movement. Intriguing,the twenty-first century was ramping up. Right on schedule.
Then, inspired by some really quite fabulous dynamic b/w action shots of Occupy NYC taken by my friend Andrew Baraf, I set out with my collaboratrix: Nguyn-9000\Synthetik – in what has become our method – to abstract some Occupy imagery. About every 2 days we’d spider another 200 random images to act as seeds for our work. N used the thirty or so new brushes we had made, on a fairly massive scale, with many opportunities to experiment on her own. Every morning there would be another fifty or so for us to review. Sometimes I made suggestions. We threw away at least eighty percent.
As a point of interest – I didn’t follow the media’s story of the Occupy saga at all – indeed, I didn’t even glance at the seed pictures as they came in – so my whole experience of the Occupy movement has been viewed through the distorted lens of the work. That leaves me a little naive and factually clueless, but that’s usually been the case anyway so…
When the boot finally came down on the occupiers in NYC, it was time to stop. I judged that we should slack off monitoring and processing and put together a little online exhibition…
It’s been fascinating to see our “angry sloppy scribbler” in action, although we still disagree about the purposes of abstraction. N is very literal. She is after all, a computer.
