box light studies
Box light studies is a long form project I’m launching on artblocks in an auction that concludes today. It represents a view into my daily sketching (for the last 8 years) and my studies of light, geometry, color and texture. Everyday I sketch and I think of the question, “what is the best combination of light, geometry, color and texture that makes me feel something, so that I can share it with the hopes that others feel something.”
First, I should say I have a love / hate relationship with long from work. I find it a hard medium, since it involves random outputs, and so much of my practice involves curation. I’ve said before that in my practice I feel like a wildlife photographer, making images and videos and trying to find the right moment to capture. I think the selection is part of the art form, and with long form you give that up in some way to randomness. It’s a definite challenge but something I think ultimately helps expose algorithms and is a bit of a crucible for generative artists to learn about themselves and their work.
I also have had a personal struggle with artblocks. In 2021, during the height of the speculative mania around NFTs I had a curated dropped planned with them in the fall. I found myself going crazy, if I’m honest, given how much time I spent looking at the random outputs of the system I had built. I love sketching, and I love trying all kind of ideas, and the matrix of possible outcomes kind of broke my brain. I really didn’t like who I had become. I found I was obsessed, and I just couldn’t get my head around what I was making and what it was making me feel. I cancelled my project, which was in some ways potentially walking away from life changing income, because I felt like my mental health was more important.
This is not the last time I’ve cancelled artblocks. In the summer of 2023, I was also working on a curated project (based on this code) and I had the same feeling, I couldn’t wrap my head around what I was making and I just need to the time and space to feel like I was ready. In both cases, I’ve been very thankful to the artblocks team for being increadibly accommodating and supportive of my decisions.
Now I’m finally here (!), with box light studies. I LOVE light. I think light is one of the fundamental things I want to spend my life studying and making work around. I am fascinated with optics. Sometimes I get the feedback from people about my work that says, “your work reminds me of an ocular migraine I’ve had.”
This is because I’m concerned with and make work around the field of optics. How do we see? How does what we see make us feel? In my case, I want to explore illumination and how light moves in mysterious ways. For example, when I walk my dog at night, and I see a car driving towards us, the headlights have these weird fringing. You can see almost a kind of glow. It’s impossible to photograph, it’s impossible to record it, but it’s something apparent on your eyes. I love those qualities.
Often when I’m in a new city, I spend my time thinking about light. For example, here are some images I took walking around in Taipei:
I love getting inspired by things in the world, then trying to code them, and in turn having the way I see the world change.
When working on this project, I chose the box because it’s a fundamental form. I was inspired by artists like Manfred Mohr and Josef Albers.
I was thinking of these boxes almost like prisms, and I love to see how they intersect and relate to each other. A box could be a container, a present, a gift. A box can also define a territory, or a boundary. The nice thing I found about boxes is that they intersect in different angles, and create tensions between 2d and 3d in ways that I like as an artist. I always want to make 2d work that feels like 3d and 3d that feels like 2d. I find it invites your eyes to do more work, and there’s something about the eye->mind->eye journey that I’m interested in.
For the light code, I used a technique that involves a lot of computational work per pixel. Esssentially it’s a kind of 2d raymarching, where the pixel shoots off in random directions to figure out its color. It means the image develops slowly, over time. There are examples of this kind of approach here and here. To help optimize things I use a technique called jump flood, which can be used to turn images into a distance map, useful for speeding up some of the light calculations. Lingdong Huang, who is a PhD student in my research group at MIT, made a great example for this here (which proved super helpful for this project). Other bits of code that helped were the fbo class from Dave Pagurek and Matt Desalaurius’s tiny artblocks.
One thing I was really interested in are all the various ways light can move and bend and translate. I experimented with dashed lines and weird glitches. I wanted to see light bend, and how it could be not just lines that are emitting light but also the relationships between lines and the space around them. Here’s some examples of these qualities I aimed for:
For color I opted to use a color palette that is based on prisms. I tried a variety of colors, and in the end I settled on a palette that seems to be expressive and true to my interest in optics. I didn’t opt for a variety of palettes but rather to see how I could push one set of colors in different directions.
I opted for an arrangement of 3 boxes. It’s a bit personal but this year has been a year of transitions and this summer I spent a lot of time thinking about my family and the changing relationships between my partner, my stepdaughter and myself. To me these boxes were people, who are in and out of harmony with each other. Which are touching each other, but also not fully contained. Some of the boxes are 2d, some are 3d, and some are somewhat between. It was really important for me to explore the tension inherent in a group of three.
Three is very important number to me because it reminds me of my father who was very superstitious and would always make us say good luck in groups of three. He was a professional storyteller, and when he would go travel he’d be leaving as ask for three good lucks and I’d say them and add fourth and he’d run back to the house asking me to add two more so that it add up to a multiple of three.
I love numbers. I think there’s incredibly beauty in math. In this work and in my work generally, I am trying to photograph math. I think of box light studies as a series of photographs. Sometimes I feel the photographic quality quite strongly, with tiny overlaps of light at different angles:
I use the word study in the project title because to me everything feels like a form of research, that it’s about studying the physical world and the world of computation. The work is an exploration, it’s constantly evolving…. I feel like I could spend my life trying to understand and study light, and I’m happy to share where I am now.
I’m so thankful to finally do artblocks and share this work with the world, and I want to send a huge thank the artblocks team (especially Sarah Rossien and Holladay Saltz) for all their help, support, and patience. I’d also like to thank Molmol Kuo, Lingdong Huang, Dave Pagurek, Chih-Yu Chen, Iskra Velitchkova, Lars Wander, Benjamin Simon and Matt DesLauriers.
