By Joshua Davis

I follow Davis' work and I thought it was quite interesting how he evaluates his work in terms of processes. I pointed out some key words from his text that I affilliate to my proposition in my artwork:

Randomness;
Accident;
Art;
Machine;
Audience of one;

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Joshua Davis is an artist and technologist who lives in New York. Since the emergence of the web as an expressive medium, Davis has continued to define the ‘cutting edge’ of digital youth culture.


Among modern artist, I conceptually identify with Jackson Pollock, not because I am a particular fan of his visual style, but because he always called himself a painter, even though a lot of the time his brush never hit the canvas. There is something in this disconnection – not using a brush or tool in traditional methods – that says a lot about the concept of dynamic abstraction; in that loss of control there can be a beauty of randomness.

Pollock might have argued it is the process of abstraction that is dynamic, not the end result, which in his case was a static painting. In my own work, the end result is never static; by making room for as many anomalies as possible, I write programs that create unique compositions.
I program the “brushes”, the “paints”, the “strokes”, the rules, and the boundaries. However, it is the machine that generates the compositions: The programs draw themselves. I am in a constant state of surprise and discovery, because the program often compiles something I would never think of executing, or which would take me hours to create manually.


The program (or “machine”, as I like to call it) is triggered simply by pressing the space bar on my keyboard. The random composition generators can populate a few hundred objects in the layout – imagine how long it would take if you had to do it by hand. Or, what if I kept asking you to give me a new composition, randomizing the assets, until you came up with a few hundred possible layouts?

Macromedia Flash is my primary piece of software. I know its limitations, but I very much like hacking it; it is just like finding new and different ways to use paint.

Basically, I am still the same artist I was as a painter, only my tools have changed.
Fundamentally, art and design have been taught as very static processes: executing style and method to arrive at an end result. I am rewriting the rules, redefining the process.

I create for an audience of one – myself. No-one else has to understand, like or “get” my work. This might seem odd considering I have chosen a medium that is open to a global audience and through which I share my work with others. If other people do not like what I produce, that is OK; if they do like it, it is an added bonus.
I know I am creating work for the love of making it, rather than because I think people will like it.

My work is malleable: I can write programs for the Net, I can capture movements for use in video or DVD broadcast, and I can run programs through a Postscript Driver to capture the composition the program generated for use in print. One process, multiple media.

For me, the artform is not the few days it takes me to write the program; it is the few weeks I will spend living with the work, waiting for the work to evolve.
Pressing the space bar, pressing the space bar, always waiting to capture that moment in time: the beautiful accident.