Recap: ‘Language and Code’ at Bushwick’s TRANSFER Gallery

Two digital projects recently shown at Bushwick’s TRANSFER Gallery explored language (both the language humans use and the language machines use) in different ways.

We were there last month as the artists explained their work to the gallery’s regulars. Founded by Kelani Nichole, TRANSFER is devoted to tech and digital work.

From the description of the show:

In their recent practice, both artists [A. Bill Miller and Daniel Temkin] explore the ways in which human/machine language patterns and new semantics emerge in conversation with our post-digital era. Through their work with language systems for communication with – and within – technological systems, space has been opened for conceptual and arbitrary inclusions. The interaction between human and machine becomes one of shifting, expanding, unstable language constructs. 

A. Bill Miller created 3D spaces inside a web browser where he used words as sort of galactic objects. Viewers explored the spaces and looked around at the giant words as they shifted about. The photo above shows one of the works on display.

Miller told us he was interested in depicting text in a way that mimicked stars and planets in space. It’s not an animation; it’s a moving 3D model that can be shown in the browser, he said.

The Milwaukee-based artist said this was his first such exploration of this type of technology. The pieces were built using the basic tools of the Internet: HTML, CSS and JavaScript. You can explore several of the pieces at Miller’s website, gridCycles.

Miller only showed one digital piece, but he had a few other pieces in which images from his digital pieces had been printed onto different sorts of media, including his T-shirt.

“The Recursive Program,” by Danile Temkin, at TRANSFER. (Photo by Brady Dale)

Daniel Temkin  showed three pieces, all running on a program he created called Light Pattern. Light Pattern uses photos to determine commands. The program reads the aperture and shutter speed from a photo’s Exif data and determines the photo’s dominant color. The content of the photo is immaterial.

“Light Pattern, like other programming languages, is a list of rules, a grammar to communicate with a compiler,” reads the project’s webpage. “In Light Pattern, this communication happens through photographs, rather than text.”

Temkin told us, “What I’m really interested in is the kind of compulsive thinking that goes into programming.”

His three pieces were “Hello World,” “Three Lamp Events” and “The LP Machine,” all of which relied on Light Pattern in one way or another. Temkin is based in Queens.