Medialogy

Watching a segment of Bärbel Neubauer’s work-in-progress, Morphs of Pegasus tonight, I was struck by the critical reversal that had taken place in material film art– the same path that her career had itself transversed. Bärbel Neubauer’s work had existed as paint on film for years, but in the last decades had transferred to the digital realm using programs such as ArtMatic, that render animations of mathematical functions creating fractals, chaos theory shapes, and other serial animated forms. As the name implies, Morphs of Pegasus has a pan-galactic quality, frequently looking like a representation of the maximal mathematical imaginary, outer-space, animating what looks like gaseous clouds, spinning galaxies, twinkling stars, and on. It occurred to me that her work in the digital was perfect representation– unlike cinema computer-generated graphics made to look like dinosaurs, or aliens, or what-have-you, these animations were direct translations of computer mathematics– perfect representations of the code. It is what Pollock did for paint, with numbers.

[caption id="attachment_142" align="alignnone" width="205" caption="one of the astronomical seeming clouds"][/caption]