Andrew Lucia: Portraits

AAP Spring 2014 Exhibitions

Portraits is a collection of material in time. Each intuitively selected moment within Portraits is an instant during a process of transformation. This transformation is not of an image’s content, rather its structure. The material exhibited in Portraits is predetermined and never lost, only reordered. In a materialist sense nothing is ever created or destroyed throughout this process, merely redistributed. As time passes each iconic image slowly dissipates until a point is reached, at which time the structure of the image is no longer recognizable. In most instances, however, the original image can still be recalled, questioning not what it is we see, but rather how what we see is ordered.

The custom written algorithm used to generate Portraits operates at an average rate of six times per hour.

The input for this algorithm is an image. Approximately every 10 minutes, each individual pixel in the image is asked to query its neighbors, evaluate their qualities, and ultimately reappropriate those adjacent characteristics. The algorithm runs for a fixed span of time.

This exhibition is set to sound by Taylan Cihan.