Digital Media Blog

One of the greatest sources of inspiration for me have always been the work of American abstract expressionist painter - Jackson Pollock. His technique of pouring and dripping paint originated an artistic movement called “action painting”.

With this technique, Pollock was able to achieve a more immediate means of creating art, but at the same time he had little control over the final effect. In the process of making paintings in this way, he moved away from figurative representation, and challenged the Western tradition of using easel and brush. He also moved away from the use of only the hand and wrist, since he used his whole body to paint.

Dynamic abstractions: Jackson Pollock (left) and Joshua Davis (right)

Smilar techniques of using traditional tools in unconventional ways are used these days by many artists but there’s one particular designer whose digital media work is very inspirational and encourages to take risks.

His name is Joshua Davis and he conceptually identifies with Jackson Pollock, because Pollock always identified himself as a painter, even though a lot of the time his brush never hit the canvas. Davis thinks that there’s something in that disconnect - not using a brush or tool in traditional methods.

Joshua Davis at his exhibition "Boards of Kings"

Joshua Davis pioneered an original methodology of computational, generative art, also known as Dynamic Abstraction. He processes hand-produced illustrations through computer algorithms to create his compositions.

He writes Action Scritpt programs to create things that couldn’t be done manually in Illustrator. His applications based on specific rules generate compositions using his drawings that are feeded to the application. This way he never gets the same composition twice.

The whole process might seem to be very lazy: run the application and wait until it generates beautiful artwork, but in reality it is much more complex.

"Music Without Wires", Joshua Davis for Wired Magazine

First of all, every time he starts work on a new project, he writes an action script application that runs a number of algorithms.

Last year, he was comissioned to prepare visuals for “Wired” magazine that would illustrate articles about music. Davis wrote a program that visualized sound into strings or wires, which he then would cut through to represent “music without wires”.

Second step of the process, that usually takes him about 4 days is manually illustrating graphics that he will use with the algorythms.  Davis combines and recombines colors borrowed from nature with forms that include organic shapes, text elements, and other symbols. The resulting “dynamic abstractions” are fluid, intricate, and “unique as snowflakes.” Then he generates numerous compositions using his drawings and scripts.

Through this randomized chaos, Davis continually seeks to find what he calls the beautiful accident: a coherent, human synthesis of the organic and technologic.

Below you can see some of his illustrations:

Over a year and a half ago I attended a Future of Web Design conference where he talked about how he finds the inspiration for his works. Next to David Martin’s speech about flash websites, I considered him as the most inspirational speaker during the whole conference. At the end of the talk, Davis shared a few simple advices with over 800 designers and developers gathered that morning in the convention centre:

- difficult is easy, simple is hard
- make work for love, not for awards or acceptance / love what you do
- find your voice, if you’re using someone else’s voice, you’ll run out of conversation pretty quick
- work like hell

You can view his whole speech from NYC FOWD’07 below: