"Vertical Fade" is a series of motion images created using the programming language Processing. Using a programming language as art media poses some interesting dichotomies. On one hand, code-based artwork is the furthest thing removed from materiality in art. As an artist, you type text instructions into a program and the computer generates an image based on these instructions. The artist cannot interact directly with the image production process. Instead, the artist can only affect the image indirectly by changing the code that draws the image. For most artists, this is a very unnatural way to work.

From a different perspective, however, code-based art is much closer to a primary art media than most other forms of digital art. In most other digital art forms, the artist interacts with the user interface of the program, and is therefore limited to the capabilities that the user interface designer has provided. A programming language, in comparison, is more closely akin to a painter grinding raw pigments to create colors. The only things that are in the image are those things explicitly placed there by the artist. The artist makes all the decisions without the software designers' aesthetic overlaid on top of it.

Another factor that intrigues me about these images is their algorithmic basis. They are, a pure implementation of some of the principles that Sol Lewitt expressed so eloquently in his work and writings, "the idea becomes a machine that makes the art." Making images such as those shown here is the result of careful planning, and programmed randomness--the randomization creating an image that is ever changing. These images are a result of decisions made by the artist and carried out by the computer. The algorithm wholly encompasses the idea; the method of reproduction is unimportant. Thus, image making through code bypasses the freight of physical craft, and enters a purely conceptual realm.

Code based art that utilizes randomization, as these images do, expresses aspects of chaos theory. Edward Lorenz coined the term "The Butterfly Effect" to describe the sensitive dependence on initial conditions of most natural phenomena. Code-based art can be programmed so that changing the initial conditions even slightly can create a radically different image. The same algorithm (the drawing "engine" so-to-speak) creates the three images in this series. Parameters fed to this algorithm create differences in the initial conditions. The resulting images are radically different in form and mood.

Performance art exists only in the moment of creation. Likewise, the images that you are viewing right now exist only on your computer in this moment of their viewing. When you close the window, all that will remain are a set of instructions to produce similar, but not identical, images. In a real sense, you create these images by viewing them.