Live Drawings

8.11.10
During 'Future Plan' a conference at Southampton City gallery concerning curation and the National Collection.

10.11.10
While considering work for an exhibition in Dublin at Rua Red Gallery in April.  Ideas around bonfires, beacons and telepresence.  Listening to news of the student occupation of Tory HQ millbank (Daniel Trilling).

18.11.10
During Thursday Club at Goldsmiths curated by Gabriel Menotti on VJing.

About Go and Mathematics.

I set myself the task of integrating my intuitive drawing practice with programming via an exploration of the ancient game of Go.  The results of these processes have been rich and here I hope to summarise them.  For me, programming is still painstaking and slow with limited visibilty of the way ahead, I am learning my way for the first time and progress is anything but intuitive. I feel my way, testing as I go and assessing each new situation as empirically as I can with digital subject matter.  The preexisting structure of the game of Go has space for intuition built into it and so out of rigid structure it produces complexity, infinite outcomes. With this in mind I force myself to understand the practicalities of its simplicity for the sake of building this instance of it, so I can play with it and thereby learn.

As I struggle with programming booleans and tidying up loops I am also presented with theoretical problems.  I am concerned that i am guilty of cultural piracy, utilising another culture's
artefacts in my own way, never having been and witnessed them in action, in context.  I wonder why I am drawn to these things, to Go, to Origami, to the I Ching, why do I want to work with them?  As Carl Jung disarmingly states in his Foreword to Richard Wilhelm's translation of the I Ching (a mathematical technology at least as old as Go and originating in the same culture ) "Since I am not a Sinologue, a foreword to the Book Of Changes (the I Ching) from my hand must be a testimonial of my individual experience with this great and singular book".  I must make the same claim for this work.  I was drawn to Go as a formal construct and as such I have explored it in my own way.  Cultural context is of enormous value in helping to understand it but for that in this instance I have relied heavily on the experience of experts d such as Richard Wilhelm and Oscar Korschelt to provide me with it.  I hope this is something that can be remedied in the future with firsthand experience and research in China and Japan.  It is a testament to the strength of these cultures that they have created  lasting, essentially mathematical structures which can in some way transcend cultural difference and be appreciated as forms outside of language.

As Alain Badiou sets out to prove, mathematics has this brilliant ability to describe things before or outside of language or philosophy; as he puts it "Ontology is Mathematics". In his collected "Theoretical Writings" edited by Ray Brassier and Alberto Toscano he describes 'being' as best described by itself and that it does so using mathematics not language. Describing his ontology he says, "philosophy must enter into logic via mathematics, not into mathematics via logic".  It is this function of Go as a mathematical construct and the facility of programming to explore such constructs in which I am interested in this work.  I am learning to program, I am learning to play Go and from this, with space left for the intuition I know well from my drawings come patterns, come signal outcomes which I can use to facilitate further development as a programmer-artist.

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GO FIND EDGES

A Brief: Intuition as Content (digital play, digital drawing)

To integrate the formal concerns of digital media into my existing practice of drawing I intend to continue to examine geometrical structures and pattern as inhabited by subjective and intuitive awareness.   This exploration should reflect the specific potential of visual programming.  That is, to allow participation, change and therefore development of playful, intuitive feedback responses within defined procedures. These systems will take as their starting point different 'game' structures which will lead to visual outputs or 'drawings' in the broad sense - visual records of a feedback relationship between consciousness and the world.

The Japanese game of Go is of particular interest as total digital simulation of it is as yet unfeasible in its complexity.  Programming in relation to Go has been most successful in providing a framework for human players to enable, record and analyse game play and the patterns therein.  I have previously made drawings based on Go game play in non-digital media when i have found the relationship between clearly defined geometric form and intuitive content or play of great relevance to my wider drawing practice.

All images by Hestia Peppe under Creative Commons.

fangirl art haiku for @amandapalmer on twitter

'coming'

This is my favourite Origami to make and was inspired by Hannah Wilke's chewing gum cunts.  It doesn't get enough outings! This is pencil dawings over a scan of an Origami and is by yours truly sometime in 2005 ish I think.  I always thought it would be funny to sell them as limited editions although giving them away for free is more my style, any takers?

being brave and hannah wilke

I recently discovered with some Joy that this now exists.
Way back in the day the first and second and third times I read the incomparable 'I love Dick' by Chris Kraus of semiotexte it was nearly impossible to find any information about Hannah Wilke (who she valiantly champions) on the web so it is truly wonderful to see this website which is run by her sister on behalf of Hannah's estate.

I have been thinking about Hannah recently in relation to her performance work 'Through The Large Glass' in relation to my research on Roy Ascott, a theorist of telematics and the art of connectivity. Ascott's work at its best is a profound mediation on art as the agent of change and transformation and at its worst naively gauche guru-style posturing. He interests me on several levels, both where I agree and disagree with him. Hannah Wilke's take on his beloved Duchamp and 'The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelor's, Even' seemed the perfect illustration both of his victories in describing an art operating across media and dimensions and of what he neglects most criminally, the body, mortality, specificity.

At the same time some kind of synchronicity or something gives me a real live happening now illustration of these issues in the Strange Tale Of Amanda Fucking Palmer and The Golden Globes which could also be entitled something along the lines of 'The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelor's, Even' she is stripping, getting married, transforming, performing and connecting left right and centre and in the meantime causing deliciously actual debate (commenting on this blog is of a very thoughtful nature, I am taking myself back to web-fandom debating in the form of patiencescalpel - its been a while since I got in fights with people I don't know on the web...I'm rusty) around feminism, art making, the music industry.  Apparently the technical term in the web/gossip commentary axis of wierd is Fame Whoring.  Wonderful I say.

We are all Fame Whore's now, baby.

I'm trying to do this whole webpresence thing properly all collaborations, altercations and interventions from others eagerly awaited.

(image still from 'Through The Large Glass' at www.hannahwilke.com copyright the artists estate)

recent origamis

all images h peppe

Prototemari

towards reinventing the globe....physical computing assignment at Goldsmiths