Truth

In the short film Powers of Ten by Charles and Ray Eames, the building blocks of our existence are shown across different orders of magnitude, from the cosmic to the cellular. One comes away from the film with not just an understanding of the vastness of our universe, but also the way our perception is affected by the experience of viewing our universe at these different scales. We find formal similarities across them, and we feel the tension of a single small screen depicting both the massive and the molecular within an instant. It leaves us with an uneasiness, which might only be satisfied by the conclusion that the true contents of these different scales — from galaxies to the human body — are actually not so different.

This impression of sameness across scales might appear antithetical to the precision of scientific research. But in fact there is a scientific area of study, known as Psychophysical Scaling, that is dedicated to understanding, defining, and quantifying ranges in subjective perceptions – using various research methods to mathematically measure them. Artists, on the other hand, are perfectly comfortable with not quantifying their perceived experiences, even the ones who use mathematically rigid algorithms to create their art.

Specifically, the artists in this exhibition, titled Truth, are dedicated to the code-based craft of generative art, pushing the boundaries of how it is made and what it can be, and delving deeply into the nature of their algorithms to uncover something new. Each of the artists — Tyler Boswell, Presstube + bzor, Ella Hoeppner, Charlotte Dann, David Seven, HAL09999, and Lisa Orth — were invited to express their existing abstract tendencies in ways that tap into their intuition. They were asked to use the short, immersive period of creation for this exhibition to encourage a harnessing of their own “inner truth.” The works in this exhibition portray the different types of universal building blocks that each artist uses — cells, threads, light, and forces — and, taken together, they abstract the range and scale of what’s possible. The interpretation of these differences in scale attempt to obscure the separateness between the minute and the enormous in ways that ultimately unite them.

“Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth.” — Pablo Picasso

While the works in this show may seem cosmic or tactile or data-driven or microscopic, the abstraction of each series hides what they are behind their very lack of definition. Each project simply showcases the uniqueness of its own artistic and generative existence, while remaining contained within the essence of its identifiable character. Through the cross-section of these abstract works — by viewing them in sets — we then magnify and embrace the difficulty in naming what something is, as a “truth.” The resulting varieties and commonalities within and among each series is itself a reflection of the universe’s infinite self-similarity. That each work’s formal devices blur the scales, references, and relationships between abstract elements is our shortcut, and unifying approach, to the greater intention of artmaking: truth-finding beyond definition.