2. Define ‘Abstract’

The word ‘abstract’ is thrown around every now and then when an image does not have a human, an environment or a natural effect which kind of slips a huge amount of art history under the carpet. The first week of Adam’s class began with a primer on abstraction while covering art movements and styles like fauvism, futurism, cubism and many more. In contemporary and traditional forms, the abstraction is very much the artist’s reaction or way of challenging a particular form of thought whereas, in CG art, some pieces would come across more as ‘product demos’ or challenging a tool’s capabilities. While viewing the many reaction-diffusion-inspired ‘abstract’ artworks that I came across, I couldn’t help but think if it was Houdini’s capability that made the artist want to make it and present it as an ‘artwork’ or the artist really intended to communicate something with it. On the contrary, a Magritte or a Kandinsky piece had that weight and gravitas of the artist either proposing a question in a new manner or answering a question with his own beliefs. These artists would have created the same image in dust gathered on a windshield. It wasn’t the paint or canvas that directed their intention, these tools just enabled them. This is what led me to a question:

“You will because you can or you can because you will?”

As much as I would pride myself to part only with the latter, in generative art it is the collaboration and balance between the medium’s (Houdini) capabilities and the artist’s intent that can create good work. This meant that I had to rid myself of a few bad Houdini habits like:

Abusing the ‘rand($FF)’ expression – I am guilty of creating a lot of possibly seizure-inducing animations using this expression.

Making one lonely sphere with just subdivide, polyextrude and noise displacement for getting a stylish render.

Looking at Simon Holmedal’s work a bit too many times. It is brilliant, but I needed to realize that it isn’t the voice or the way I could think and attain right off the bat as a beginner.

I was introduced to the non-representational art of Wassily Kandinsky a few years ago by a great and unique teacher at my college. Kandinsky’s book ‘Concerning the Spiritual in Art’ contains some very valuable thoughts about abstraction like:

“Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with its many chords. The artist is the hand that, by touching this or that key, sets the soul vibrating automatically.”

Observe how this quote is already hinting at a hierarchy of dependencies through metaphors to actually make a profound statement. Also, it is evident that he had a code of sorts to his visual language and was procedural in his approach towards making compositions inspired from music. He would create a correspondence between colors, shapes, and emotions, make his own laws like “circles deserve to be blue” and then use these rules to drive all his decisions towards the intended emotion for a composition. It made me understand the value of having my own rules (or axioms) that attach meaning to forms to make the ‘letters’ of my visual language which then come together in peculiar ways to form the ‘grammar’ in Houdini. With all the algorithms that you can implement in Houdini, it is easy to let scientific temper get the better of you and lose out on opportunities to communicate symbols, associations, and designs that are essential ingredients to having your own unique definition of abstraction. Also, it is quite engaging to think of what these algorithms signify – chaos, order, unity, destruction. For example, Voronoi divisions are found not only in cracked walls but also when a layer of bubbles coalesces together. It is something that can break concrete but can also build a wall of thin soap – does it symbolize integrity and destruction at the same time? Laying down these concepts as groundwork can help you build an internal logic (which might be only understood by yourself) to inform the choices you make with forms and procedures to define your own method of abstraction.