Joshua Davis and Dynamic Abstraction

Joshua Davis is an artist, web and graphic designer who coined the phrase "dynamic abstraction" in art - an awesome idea that reinvents the creation of art.

Joshua Davis was one of the pioneers of the induction of Flash as a mainstream web application. His rise to becoming one of the front runners of web design and all the new ideas to come with it started with the release of his 2001 autobiography featured in k10.net. He describes how he overcame drug addiction in order to pursue his goal of becoming a full time artist. He began to learn HTML at the Pratt Institute in 1995, and soon after began to experiment with the new application called flash. His work had a major influence on the "Y2K" era of the internet's dot-com explosion. Davis has created websites for many companies, people, and bands. Today he teaches at New Yorks School of Visual Arts.

In 2004 Davis was asked to write an essay called "Dynamic Abstraction". This idea finally brought a clear view of the kind of work he had already been creating for the previous few years. Davis had been interested in the idea of randomization in art, and the "chaos theory" and what would happen when applied to computer generated art in a controlled environment. In the essay, Davis states the following:

"Among modern artists I conceptually identify with Jackson Pollock - not that I’m a particular fan of his visual style, but because he always identified himself as a painter, even though a lot of the time his brush never hit the canvas. There’s something in that disconnect - not using a brush or tool in traditional methods.”

Here is an example of Davis' work using dynamic abstraction:



Basically, the analogy is that the brush never hitting the canvas is like the user of the program (whether it be Photoshop, Flash, Illustrator, etc.) never actually directly using a tool from the pallet or various menus. Instead, the actual of creation of art is created by a program written with specific rules and boundaries that use the tools to generate the art dynamically. In other words, the program creates the image, but because the program was created with specific ideas in mind by a human, its still considered (at least by me) art.

Davis also states the following, which helps to explain the above:

“Pollock might argue that it’s the process of abstraction that’s dynamic, not the end result, which in his case is a static painting. In my own work, the end result is never static; by making room for as many anomalies as possible, every composition generated by the programs we write is unique to itself. I’ll program the “brushes,” the “paints,” the “strokes,” the “rules”, and the “boundaries”. However it is the software that creates the compositions — the programs draw themselves. I am in a constant state of surprise and discovery, because the program may structure compositions that I may never have thought of to execute or might take me hours to create manually.”

To me, the idea of dynamic abstraction is the ultimate marriage of art and technology. A human writes a program with rules and boundaries, which control the tools of a program, which in turn create imagery, which finally becomes art. The idea certainly makes unclear the line between art and technology. 50 years from now will a painting created by a robot with a paint brush be considered art so long that the robot was created by a human?

Whats the difference between a person creating a program which creates imagery, and a robot that creates imagery? If the person defines the exact boundaries of the robots movements, and the programs variables, I see no reason it should be different. Anyways, I digress.

Some examples of Joshua Davis's work can be found at once-upon-a-forest.com and joshuadavis.com.

Nathan