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“Way back, when Walt Disney came out with the movies in theater…the first time I saw Tinkerbelle go up to the screen …I decided I wanted to do that” says Bonny Lhotka of one of the early experiences that inspired her as a child to grow up and become an artist. Lhotka, who graduated in 1964 from Bradley University–having been schooled in printmaking and painting–did just that. She became an artist, and has since gone on to exhibit her unique form of digital and mixed-media prints worldwide.
Lhotka’s art has been commissioned by and/or resides in the collection of several hundred patrons, including United Airlines, Lucent Technologies, Wells Fargo, Charles Schwab and The U.S. Department of State.
She is the winner of a Smithsonian/Computerworld Technology in the Arts Award, and in 1997 Lhotka organized Digital Atelier: A printmaking studio for the 21st Century at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, which included her being an artist-in-residence there for 21 days.
Lhotka has used her impressive wealth of talent and her pioneering skill set to inform others through speaking engagements, educational forums, in her prose and visual art , and recently published is her book Digital Alchemy: Printmaking Techniques for Fine Art, Photography and Mixed-Media.
Last year Lhotka exhibited at Walker Fine Art in a group show and this year will exhibit solo there in an exhibit entitled Horizons , and over the six months via email, post mail and phone conversation, she took the time to share her heart’s artistic passion—the pulse of her life’s work.
Digital Alchemy by Bonny Lahotka
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Bonny Lhotka’s Digital Alchemy
by Max Eternity
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Max Eternity (ME): Hi Bonny, thanks for taking the time to speak to me on behalf of The Huffington Post and AD MAG.
Bonny Lhotka (BL): I’m glad to do it. That’s a very nice magazine you have online.
ME: I want to ask about your early beginnings as a traditional artist, then how you became a digital artist. What inspired you to be an artist?
BL: Way back, when Walt Disney came out with the movies in the theater. The first time I saw Tinkerbelle go up to the screen and the image fell out of the brush, I decided I wanted to do that. The other thing was a field trip to the art institute of Chicago. I saw an exhibition of Seurat, Cezanne and Monet. Seeing those original oils in person, I remember that to this day. That luscious surface as opposed to what I had seen in a book. I was just drawn to that.
My training in college was in printmaking and painting. I did acrylic and collograph prints, and oil painting. I worked like that through 1990. Then in the Denver, the art market plummeted. There were no sale, little interest. I decided I would give up my studio, or expand and create something beyond traditional media. At that time HP [Hewlett Packard] had come out with the first color printer. When I saw a print at a MacWorld convention in San Francisco, I knew at that moment the direction I wanted to go.
At MacWorld I figured out what I needed to go that route; it was about 1992.
Had life been different, I would have ended up being an accountant or going into medical research. At one point I thought to be a speech therapist. But it made more sense to stick to my training in fine art.
ME: How did you go from there? What did you start out doing first?
BL: I heard about a workshop that Dorothy Krause was giving called Beyond the Digital Print. It was a workshop combining traditional printmaking with inkjet. I met Dorothy and Karen Schminke. The three of us from that day on began a collaboration to gain access to equipment and test it for fine art applications.
We have written hundreds of articles about the research. Even today we continue to explore; getting feedback to artists and companies of what we’d like to see in the next generation of hardware.
I think what’s important is that none of us liked the straight digital print, so because we came from the traditional background we were missing that experience. That’s what drove us to create all these new techniques of mixing traditional and digital.
ME: In the past we have referred to artists who work in multiple mediums as multi-disciplined artists. But a few years back I came up with the term TADAE, which stands for Traditional And Digital Artist Engineer, because it occurred to me that some artists weren’t just working in a variety of media, they had also become entrepreneurs, writers, programmers, engineers, inventors, editors, publishers, educators and the like. You’re working on a book right now. You’re also an inventor, and you’ve got your own line of products, called DASS.
BL: I’m an inventor and I apply my creativity to get to where I want to go. I see an end vision—working backwards to a starting point. I draw on common everyday observation in material and experience to find a solution to create the image that I’m after. When I wanted my digital prints to look like they were on plaster, I researched frescos, how they were made; the chemistry of it. I applied that research with what I had in my kitchen, putting together the gelatin and calcium carbonate. I found that any liquid I could convert to a gelatin state, I could lay [a print] on it and the image would move to the gelatin. You could never do this with an inkjet.
That gelatin can be made with marble dust, sand, ground up gravel, and other things.
So it’s that treating the inkjet print on film as the plate. That would be parallel to a traditional ink plate, which can be treated a variety of ways, making part of it scraped away to create one of a kind pieces of artwork.
ME: But of course, as you probably know the art world can be sometimes be a very conservative place, often resisting change. Have you experience with this?
BL: I still think there’s a resistance today amongst collectors thinking of digital prints of something of value.
We had our first exhibit of digital prints in 1994 at Sandy Carson Gallery. It was the most people she had ever had at an opening. And when we did the event at the Smithsonian, people show up angry and hostile, saying that it was not art. The curators didn’t know what to think.
ME: So, has this mentality changed at all? What’s stopping collectors from taking digital prints as seriously as they should?
BL: [sighs] The ease at which an artist can use the editioning process, and the lack of a guarantee, it’s just too easy to make them. And I think that’s what has driven me to combine the hands-on, because the digital part of it is just a step to get to where I’m going.
ME: Art forgeries are historically legendary. There’s the real possibility of fakes, with oil paintings and other traditional media?
BE: It’s a lot harder to fake an oil in quantity.
I have seen very few signed limited edition digital prints, and certainly photography is 98% of the market. And photographers have never really limited what they did. So fine art artists are fighting that paradigm set up by photographers.
Certainly, prior to digital imaging, artist could only integrate photography into collage or a transfer method that was very toxic, similar to what Rauschenberg did. Artists were sampling and collaging from newspapers and magazines.
What I find very curious is that 5 years ago I had an an exhibit in Denver, to discover i had been voted the best experimental photographer in Denver. And I was like okay, I’m a photographer? That is hung around my neck that I’m a photographer, but i don’t know why, because I’m not a photographer.
I think it’s strange how the marketplace has to put a tag on someone.
ME: So how do we work to remedy this?
BE: When we first started i came up with the term unique edition. That edition was an edition of a one-of-a-kind print that came from the same matrix of the computer. And, I will say that with my cured ink flatbed printers, there is a difference how the artwork is perceived. These prints are much more accepted by collectors. They commission them.
ME: But many fakes do exist with traditional media, so doesn’t it go back to trusting the dealer and the artist for authenticity?
BE: Yes, that’s what it’s about. You have to know who you’re buying from.
I’ve heard stories of traditional artist signing blank pieces of paper, later to be printed by whomever.
Me. Yes, me too—specifically about Salvador Dali being one of the ones who was supposedly notorious for doing this. Okay…so, tell me about your new book.
BE: I’m writing a book named Digital Alchemy: Techniques for Fine Art, Photography and Mixed-Media. It’s going to be about all of the products and recipes I’ve made for creating digital art.
It’s strictly process; it will not tell people how to be artists. I’m just giving people tools to go beyond that digital print.
ME: Anything else new and exciting happening?
BL: A gallery in Denver, Walker Fine Art, will have an exhibition that I’m in, and that work will be new work with lasers–laser flatbed. I’ve taken these transfer techniques, where i can get my digital image on wood or metal. I sent that to the laser and it transfers that into a print. Also I’ve devolved a process of putting digital images on crystal colorless glass, which look like daguerreotype. There’s an example of those to be in my book.
ME: You have some very informative tutorial podcasts on Youtube, many of which I’ve seen. Great ideas, it’s very inspiring.
BL: Taking really old photography to contemporary media, it’s really unique. Every day I get up is a new dawn, and I never have a plan. Something starts.
I’m a little like a canoe in a fast floating river. When I hit a rock, I just go the other way. My mother said I collect solutions for problems I don’t have.
That’s why [I’ve written] the book. I’m giving solutions to other people.
ME: That’s wonderful. I enjoyed speaking with you. Thanks again.
BL: Well, thank you for the interview.
Postmodern Modernist Generator
In Art, Commentary, News on September 21, 2010 at 3:10 pm___________________________________________________________________________
Postmodern Modernist Generator
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The Postmodern Modernist Generator [PMG] is a creative programming tool I originally created in 2006. It explores automating an artistic design process in a lighthearted manner. The art generator was designed to systematically break down and simplify the design process for automation, with each resulting piece being uniquely different.
Although automating an artistic process through computer programming is actually pretty easy, it is, however, nearly an impossible task to replicate the human factor. As artists are typically inspired by an array of indeterminate things–thinking organically and acting out of intuition, more than out of set parameters or processes. Differences in how artists perceive their subject matter and the choices they make, while rendering their works, create endless controlled variations in output. Hence the best one can hope to do with an computer emulated artist process, is going to be an approximation of a set of potential artist creative paths that lead to a graphic result.
As I add logic to the decision algorithms, add chaos to the system and increase the set of systemic processes available to the emulated artist, the possible set of paths and subsequent results essentially reach infinite variations. The PMG is not meant to replace the human touch, and by no means consistently generates better looking designs than a human can. However it does generate good output fairly often; much faster than a real human artist can on their own.
For the purposes of this project I have simplified the process to a set style of abstract modernist forms and designs, for now, focusing on automating color choices, subject matter, layout, image manipulation and the abstraction process in the digital environment ,using mostly processes that a digital artist would most likely employ.
While the program generates abstract modernist looking output, the overall concept of creating an automated artist process is somewhat of a postmodern concept, hence the title “Postmodern Modernist Generator”.
PMG contains a limited artificial intelligence, which automates the color choices, layout, image manipulation, as well as the balance of abstraction vs. detail and titling. It’s a process that takes about a second to complete.
Color choices are automated by arbitrarily referencing a color lookup table for color relationships that work. The color relationships are derived from sampling the most prominent colors, from a variety of sources. Historically significant artists works are sampled, like Calder, De Kooning and Matisse, with a good many samplings derived from Bauhaus Master and noted color theorist, Josef Albers. Nature is also a good source for color relationships that work, and samples are taken from random images on the web.
Here’s the technical rundown.
The PMG algorithms generates malleable color schemes much the same way Adobe Kuler works; plotting relationships on an internal color wheel. This is applied to a rotational offset, which extracts a new set of rgb values with the same relationships. In this way color options are endless, but generally work well together.
After a color scheme has been chosen, the applet creates shaders from chosen colors. It then creates a 3d world of primitives and assigns them the shaders. This creates an arbitrary volumetric space to be abstracted and expands the color depth of the source image.
A 2d image is then extracted and run through a variety of systemic and procedural process for abstraction. Virtual layers are created, assigned a stacking order, and various levels of opacity are applied. Then all layers are merged.
Lastly when the graphic processes are complete, the program assigns the work a title by combining a noun, an adjective and a random number attempting in futility to assign meaning to the work. While this is a trivial task to program, it is an important final step in the process of creating a modernist work. Since in my view, modernism seeks to make sense out of the senseless; imposing meaning through art where otherwise there is none.
When AD MAG inquired about PMG, I found it an odd, serendipitous timing, because I had recently received several emails about the work from internet viewers asking a variety of questions; mostly around how it works and where the images are coming from. Some people were in disbelief that the images are generated on demand. The questions and interest in the project reminded me of what I had always wanted to do with the program; to make it completely autonomous.
Now, I’m setting the PMG free.
This project has had several incarnations over its life as an executable, a shockwave application, a Google gadget and a screensaver, and until being asked to write this essay, PMG was an application controlled by a user. The user was the decider. But now that is not the case. I have set it free from users. I have given the program the capacity to run autonomously and and through some nice advances in social networking integration, PMG can post its own output via email to its own blog, Facebook Tumblr , Twitter et all.
Adding self promotion to the process of creating a work makes sense. Artists are perpetual promoters. In order to make an autonomous artist simulation, it must be able to promote itself and trumpet its creations. .
The ability to connect a generative artwork to an array of social networks, give PMG a profile, allowing it to post on its own while I sleep, work, play with the kids or do whatever opens up a new world of possibilities and questions.
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Don Relyea is an artist, programmer, sound designer and inventor specializing in print making and information systems. Relyea experience extends through the video and interactive CD production, as well as multi-media content for traditional and digital. He is particularly focused in the area of computational art; writing his own custom art software in C++ and Open GL. And he often uses his creative skills to weave cultural, social and political dimensions into his work. Nature and mathematical forms are also common subjects. Relyea’s artwork has been in exhibited internationally. In 2008, his politically charged “hair particle drawing” portrait of George Bush was simultaneously exhibited in Los Angeles and New York. Recently, Relyea’s video art series Generative Flowers has been installed outdoors in Downtown Dallas, in the Digital Grafitti Festival at Alys beach Florida, the W hotel in Seoul Korea and the International Free Exchange Zone in Incheon Korea. Relyea is also an avid inventor with many patents pending. Relyea lives and works in Dallas Texas USA with his wife and three kids.