John Anderson
John anderson
Sípàapuni
John studied art in England at West Surrey College of Art & Design as well as Arizona State University. At ASU he was privileged to study under the guidance of art photography historian, Bill Jay. There he had personal access to many of the legends of photography including Eugene Smith, Paul Caponigro, Minor White, and Ansel Adams.
John worked many years in Chicago as a professional photographer. He then developed a successful career in Information Technology at AT&T Bell Laboratories, studying for a Master of Science from Northwestern University.
Since his early academic days at ASU, John has always sought to bridge Science with Art. At ASU he built his own gas lasers to make art holograms. His paper on making holograms was published by the University. In the latter part 1980s he pursued various developments in 3D programs, animation, digital video, and music. He continued his pursuits of digital photography and music into the new millennium. In 2006 he began experimenting with various procedural algorithms and making generative art. In 2012 he published an electronic book, ‘Projected Moments’. Here he introduces some current scientific thought concerning information theory and the acquisition of meaning and truth. His works represent his ideas about creating art in the digital age.
“… while i was at the Met one day, i had the chance to view many photo succession works donated to the museum by Alfred Stieglitz. I was amazed by their particular “non photographic” quality. They were printed, often on thick art drawing paper. Indeed, the Gum bichromate looked like charcoal drawings with a viscous nature. I thought that perhaps my ‘projected moments’ could be printed in similar fashion on heavy museum quality water-colour paper. The results were very effective. I took them to many museums and galleries but none were willing to handle digital prints due to complexities in guaranteeing uniqueness and providence. However, the expense of doing so was tremendous for an unrepresented artist. Therefore, taking cue from Stieglitz’s ‘equivalents” departure from the photo succession movement and heading in the f64 direction that celebrated the essence of photography as its own medium and art form, I decided to approach my digital work in the same fashion. If there was a problem selling digital works as well produced physical prints, then why bother? Why not stay with the true nature of digital art, in and of itself? With a firm belief that the art world would someday catch up, I became ‘digitally native’, dealing with the essence and nature of the medium itself. All my photo synthesis work has been and remains digitally native since 2006.”
The projected moments have an interesting abstract expressionism that embraces digital artefacts as brush strokes in a water-colour landscape. The generative work contains modernistic undertones along with, at times, an Escher like quality.