Tithü Editorial by Max Chevron

Tithü is an exhibit of extraordinary breadth that presents eight 3D animations and fifty-seven 2D abstractions over five floors of exhibition space. Here you will encounter broad fields of vibrant colors and intricate details that stand alone and together as a body of work. Large fields of color give way to intricate details, movement, and a strong sense of balance within the compositional square.

This exhibit demonstrates the depth and prolific nature of John Anderson as a digital artist. The images are abstractions from a single frame of 24 frames per second animation. One cannot help but wonder the wealth of visual information that was available for Anderson to explore. He helps us imagine, in the digital domain of resolution independent algorithms, what is just beyond the event horizon, waiting to be seen.

In 2012 I had the privilege of meeting John, reviewing his Projected Moments work and writing the forward for his book by the same title.

- “Projected Moments”. DigitWork, 2012. Apple Books. https://books.apple.com/us/book/projected-moments/id509231348.  

John has an interesting background. Christened by birth into the institutional halls of art and education, he undertook his confirmation through studies at West Surrey College of Art & Design and 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. While at ASU John pursued research into transmission holograms, while designing and building his own gas lasers.

John worked for 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 and providing consultation to Fortune 100 corporations.

In his digital e-book of 2012, John introduced us to his thinking regarding digital art, scientific directions in the field of information theory, and the acquisition of meaning and truth.

It is my pleasure, once again, to interview John and write this editorial for his Tithü exhibition.

Max Chevron

John, thank you for the opportunity to interview you for the new exhibition. It was a pleasure to work with you in the past and I am quite intrigued by your new work. Your present work, for me, is a dramatic departure from the Projected Moments series in the e-book and what you printed, quite handsomely, on French watercolor paper.

Even so, I do see some continuity of style from then to now regarding an interest in fields of color, your use (I suspect) of layers, and composition within a square format. You have also metaphorically continued with an interest in the American Southwest and indigenous cultures of that area. What do you see as the most dramatic departure for you with the Tithü exhibit?

John Anderson

Thanks Max, good to connect with you again. Really, it’s all there, nothing has changed that much with one big exception. I am digitally native. I don’t carry around massive Epson and Canon printers, rolls of paper and expensive inks and heavy inventories. I do still produce high resolution dpi images for the collector who wants a printed piece on their wall other than the nonporous and luminous screen of a computer or smart TV.

I was so happy when it became possible to move away from a negative/positive wet and caustic, darkroom approach with the advent of digital photography. I was relieved to become unencumbered of the darkroom process by using digital technology. However, the dry digital post process and printing on paper started to become a drag. Especially after nobody expressed an interest nor purchased the stuff.

I had already resigned myself to the fact that producing items for people to hang on a wall was an incredible investment for a poor artist who made art that probably no one would see.  And it was digital. People could copy it with impunity. Everyone is utterly spoiled and inundated on the Internet with free and often quite amazing imagery that flashes past our eyes in seconds and then is gone, to be replaced by more visual fodder.

This begs the question of what the role of pictorial or abstract art in our society is today. You see, I have spent nearly my whole professional life (36 years) on a screen. I take to virtual environments like a fish in water. People here in Italy sometimes think i am insane and hate this whole internet thing, wanting to get back to art that is collected, fills the walls of a home, and provides visual enjoyment. Virtual worlds are seen as sick and an indication of all the things that are going wrong in our world today, especially the increasing isolation, the loss of locality and community because of technology.

But this brings up the question of why a person would collect a work of art. It must be for some sort of love or joy. To do it as a collector of things simply relegates its value and meaning to objects of financial and historical worth. How does something originate in the ether and find its way across time and space to resonate and find meaning in the heart of a person? That is art’s mysterious ministry.

But I digress some. I understand people’s view about virtual life and environments. I don’t think though many understand how archaic and ancient it seems to me to find a frame to put a piece of art inside of and then hang it on a wall. I just don’t see the need anymore.

I used to make art and publish it on the web, thinking that’s it – it’s the best I could do. But then along came the blockchain and now things are changing a little bit. There is still the same games with folks looking to make a killing, with gated communities and galleries pretending to be decentralized, often through a progressive franchising matrix. But one thing remains solid with blockchain.

There is providence now that becomes indisputable for a piece of digital work, there are rights of ownership. When I mint a piece of art on the blockchain it’s there forever. If the blockchain exists, long after I am dead and gone, the work is still there digitally and there is the chance that it will mysteriously make its way into the heart of another person or many people. So, I am digitally native and that is unlikely to change.

Max Chevron

Thanks John, I think you are speaking to some truths that many of us are feeling these days. If you don’t mind though, let’s get back to the task at hand and the art. Can you tell me a little about your approach with this exhibition?  What is your working process and how have you achieved such striking imagery?

John Anderson

Sure, Max. I have always enjoyed working with color, often vibrant and dynamic fields of color and how these can be arranged compositionally. I have also been fascinated with the idea of abstraction and what it means today against its artistic meaning in the past. That itself is a form of abstraction or anachronism.

Contextually, for art, it was to remove elements that contributed to realism and pictorial representations of the world, though the art itself was a form of abstraction from reality. I think we eventually got to the place in art where pictorials no longer mattered when it came to art.

My father was a sculptor, colleague and contemporary of Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth. Although his work is best defined as modern he was capable of carving marble or casting in bronze, a realistic portrait of a person that would give you chills and goosebumps. As an educator he always maintained that a fine artist needed to master the techniques and ability to draw, paint or sculpt realistically before they could produce abstract art. He would insist that without that ability what was the artist abstracting from?

The word abstract comes from the Latin abstractus – literally, drawn away or in the past participle, abstrahere, ab is from, trahere is drawn off, to draw off, take off or pull off from, that is to abstract. I find this interesting because traditionally as David Hockey recently wrote, that abstraction was to take away, remove, the shadows and pictorial representations of reality from a work of art – and we had taken that, in his view, about as far as we could do, he implied such even with the computer, citing when Frank Stella made sculptures of smoke using computers. But this I think is a narrow view.

You see, I was doing abstractions with my projected moments. I would shoot very high-resolution panoramas and then run various processes, layers, and filters upon them, exploring fields of colors within the landscape. What I noticed was that if I zoomed in on a section of the panoramas one would find quite unique visuals of color fields and digital artifacts that didn’t look even remotely like the panorama or a photograph. In essence I was drawing, pulling out from, or abstracting, from within something that was much greater in scale and scope. So, it was not my intent to subtract from the pictorial, I had found my way into another world of abstraction far greater and more interesting. I naturally made a match for these with the watercolor paper, knowing that I was no longer making a photograph with my digital photographic tools.

In the same fashion this is what I am doing now with the new work. It all starts in the digital domain using resolution independent algorithms that I patch together to create interesting, generative, visual effects. I channel the parameters of these algorithms to change and modulate themselves and each other over time, thus creating the animations. I then layer these together, much like I would layer things with the panoramas. Finally, because the algorithms are resolution independent, I can go deeply inside of them, sometimes iteratively to discover fascinating color compositions. I used this approach with the Wavy Gravy series as well to create a journey into affordable NFTs via a Satoshi like approach and the presentation of fractional abstract art. People are astounded when they see the incredible detail and the imagery that exist on these minute scales. There are a total of 900 images abstracted from the single Wavy Gravy' (Bear), image in the Blotter Art collection. Each piece is sold for .001 ETH (about $3.50). Any purchase of an abstract provides an opportunity to unlock a free high resolution, 15568 × 15568 px, 288 dpi file of the Wavy Gravy art work from which the abstractions were obtained.

I use a square format most of the time. Perhaps this goes back to my days as a photographer. I used to shoot with a Hasselblad which has a square format. I have always liked the way things can be worked compositionally and with movement inside of that format. Beside fields of color and composition, I am also interested in movement. With movement, I’m talking more to still images than the animations.

Max Chevron

Thank you, John. I will go back to the panoramas, projected moments, and Tithu exhibits better informed. With your transition into being purely or natively digital, do you consider yourself a photographer?

John Anderson

No, I do not. Not anymore. It’s funny, I was always on the lookout for a camera that fit my way of shooting. I finally found that in the Leica Q, and I absolutely love the lens that is fixed and optimised for that camera. But you know what, I hardly ever break it out anymore. I used it all over Italy and was able to achieve a level of shooting and print quality I had always desired. I still love photographs and reading them. A photographer doesn’t view a photograph, he reads them. Photography has always been my main love since I was 19 and living in England. I thought we would never part and up until very recently that was the case. Now I shoot more often with my iPhone. It better suits my way of shooting but I wish it could perform like the Leica.

I have known since my early days that it would be tough to ever make a living with a camera. I may have chickened out but that lead to greater things. The camera took me into lasers, holography, astronomy, subatomic physics, information technology and theory, philosophy, and traveling. So, I owe a lot to this simple instrument. Actually though, the computer is the camera. But for the moment, I’m done with it in the traditional sense. I think a comprehensive view regarding the history of art photography helps with appreciating photographic art. Therefore, my audience is quite narrow with traditional art photography. That is not so with global networks, NFTs and generative art.

So now days, I’m a digital artist producing in the NFT domain. I think NFTs hold promise for digital artists. For many kinds of artist. I love the providence and security one finds with blockchain. Funny, when I worked as a Chief Information Security Officer, we were thinking that blockchain might provide some serious authentication capabilities. I’ve been out of that field for five years and don’t know where those things have gone. I hope things go well with the exhibit and NFTs. But it’s the art and the making of art that is important. I must believe that the information contained in my work will find its way to where it belongs, for it truly has a life of its own and I am simply the mediator/channel.

Max Chevron

Yes, you hit on that in quite an amazing way with your book Projected Moments and also with the narrative for the exhibit “NFT: Is it Art?”

John Anderson

Thanks, Max. The philosophical intent is important in being able to define, at least for myself, what art is. I hope it resonates with many more folks.

Max Chevron

I believe it does, John. Thank you for your time and valuable contribution to the furtherance of art in the digital domain.