Transcript
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ALEKSANDRA JOVANIĆ
My name is Aleksandra Jovanić. I’m Associate Professor at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Belgrade, Serbia. I teach at New Media department. And actually, my set of subjects is called Technology of New Media.
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On a day-to-day basis, I’m working as a professor in the faculty, but also I’m working on my art practice. I see myself recently as mostly doing generative art. That means I’m, in part, coding systems that, when put in motion, give us various interesting and exciting results. In other words, I’m writing code. And code can be executed. And most of the time, code is making some kind of visual output. Sometimes, it’s not only visual output, it can be also audio or the combination of audio-visual output.
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My most recent project, actually, the project I’m still working on, is an exploration of old apparatus or device called phenakistoscope. And it’s considered one of the first devices that allowed us to see moving images. And now I’m exploring how new media can work with old traditional devices.
So I’m making through code phenakistoscopes. I’m making colourful discs that when put on record player through a camera with a fixed frame rate can be seen as continuous looping animations. It has a history of traditional media in it. And it can be done by hand, like with traditional animation when you’re drawing each frame.
Here is the same process, but with using code, I can generate really fast different variations of the same concept. I’m adding a lot of randomness inside of these phenakistoscopes. So with each reload, I’m getting a different disc, different animation. So it would be labour hard to draw each disc by hand. It could be done. But this system, generative systems, give us a lot of exciting results. By incorporating randomness, we’re always getting different results and, sometimes, we get unexpected results depending on the constraints we are putting inside of the system.
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So for years, it was influenced by technology or the devices, machines, artists used. And for years, abstract geometry was dominant type of visualisations. So now I see people are more exploring figurative, tactile designs, designs that have-- that simulate more nature or more traditional mediums. So maybe this field is becoming more recognisable or more dominant inside of generative art, but I don’t see that abstract or geometric style is going out of style. So basically, it will stay. So this might be something for the future.