amorphoscapes by Stanza. Aesthetic code based generative artwork series by Stanza. generative, interactive, netart, shockwave, audio visual, interface, coded, abstract.

Amorphoscapes. A Series of abstracted code based aesthetic artworks from (1995 - 2005) by Stanza

NOTE: Use internet explorer for this site.

================================

About

The amorphoscapes series have been exhibited internationally over the last ten years. They have featured at Siggraph, won first prizes at festivals such at New Forms Canada and SeNef Korea. The online web based version have been featured on the BBC and touch screen versions have been exhibited at The Jerwoord Space, Tate Britain and Venice Bienalle. They have also been shown at many conferences and festivals around the world.

Amorphoscapes, Subvergence, Entropy II, Biocities, Inner City, Virusa, Central City (made at 800 by 600)

Biocities, Codified, Mirella, Diversity, Nanocities, Elasticity, Spider Maps are all available as software suites. (made at 1024 by 768)

Interactive, generative, audio visual, digital paintings and drawings created specifically for the internet. This is interactive art on the internet, incorporating generative sounds and coded imaging. Amorphoscapes, provide a seductive, multi-sensory non linear and interactive experience for the audience to immerse into. Now available as touch screen based works as well as a live performance event.

Ten years of Amorphoscapes. 1995 - 2005.

audio visual relationships between art and science....maybe......[download information sheet... pdf info]

Stanza is a London based British artist who specializes in net art, data sculptures, and networked space. Work has been shown at The Venice Biennale, Tate Britain, The Victoria and Albert Museum. Recipient of Nesta Dreatime Award, AHRC creative fellowship and numerous prizes. His award winning online projects have been invited for exhibition around the world. Stanza also travels extensively to exhibit and present his artworks, lecturing and giving performances of his audiovisual interactions.

Exhibitions

Stanza touch screen interactive exhibitions have taken place at the following selected venues.

Venice Biennale 2007. 52nd international Art Exhibition - la Biennale di Venezia

Tate Britain. (Part of Late at Tate Britain series, by Cybsersonica) 2007.

Artsway Plymouth, New Forest Pavillion. 2007

Blip Festival Brighton. 2005.

The Dana Centre London. Organised by Cybersonica. 2005

Folly Gallery Lancaster. 2005

The Watershed Media Centre. 2005

Cut and Splice at Jerwood Space, London. 2005

Arts Depot, London April 2005

Active Interiors: 10 Years of Stanza's Interactive Art E.S.P. Media Lounge, Pacific Design Center, West Hollywood USA. The first showing and sales of the touchscreen editions where supported, curated and exhibited by David Mather in 2004 in LA.

Touchscreen

These works are for sale and exhibition on touch screens and plasma screens, available for public foyers, galleries and interiors. For for more information on the touch screens click here.

Aesthetic code based generative artwork series by Stanza.

There is a suite of works within each edition. You can find the works by moving your fingers down to the bottom of the screen. The previously hidden menu then appears. You can then select a new work by touching the screen. Within each work there are several layers of interactivity. Some works have hidden areas, in some the interactivity is more clear, and in others one has to explore to find and experience different parts of the artwork. And in other works such as Biocity there are generative areas, ie, if left alone the artworks will generate on their own over time.

These are limited edition artworks. They are all individually numbered in each edition. These artworks are all for sale.

For provenance, the sold copies have an individual number of the edition in the bottom of the main opening screen. This is a unique number. This number also matches the number and title on the signed cd rom. This cannot therefore be copied as it is the only one with a unique number and the same number on signed disk.

A number of demo copies are available for viewing only.

Keywords generative, paintings, code, aesthetics, interactive, automata, artworks, systems, touchscreen, audio - visual.

Stanza

Coded Behaviour

The following text is by Charlotte Frost for the Artsway catalogue to accompany work to the Venice Biennial.

Biocities (2003) and Inner City (2002) are audio-visual, interactive, digital paintings. They form part of Stanza’s Amorphoscapes series (which he has been working on since 1997). Unlike existing web-based incarnations, these are limited-edition touch-screens which better demonstrate Stanza’s uncompromising ability to craft technology. These works are exquisitely executed. Aesthetically and technologically they are flawless, standing out vividly against a backdrop of new media art which can be clunky and ill-defined. Even to the untrained eye, or those uninitiated in new media arts, Stanza’s skills and outputs as an artist working with electronic technologies are apparent.

These works present two predominant devices to actively trace urban topographies. One is a seeping aesthetic, where blank screens are gradually flooded with colour and texture which appears to perpetually map and re-map its terrain (as seen in Biocities); it is American-Action-Painting-meets-London-Underground-cartography as the city is given life through visual veins and audio arteries. The other is a stamping aesthetic where heavily-stylised city corners, crevices and conversational off-cuts are sporadically overlaid causing a constant collaging (as in Inner City). Harder to characterise, this effect is something like a strobe inflicting O’Keefe’s eye for detail on a minimalist canvas. Such effects are heavily indebted to Modernism but no less impressive in their new media incarnation.

For me, what is most striking about these pieces – and indeed Stanza’s present work The Emergent City – is its reference to ritual, or socially-loaded, repetitive behaviour. The rituals I find implicit in these works are both urban and artistic. Each of the works amasses aural and aesthetic details which loosely depict a range of city-specific behaviour. However, and this is key, Stanza does not tell us what these behaviours are. He provides a montage of animate archaeological evidence which evoke the comings-and-goings of a city and its inhabitants. The effect is somewhat like sitting at a central hub of city activity and watching the constant ebb and flow of people, trains or traffic, feeling both integral and irrelevant as the movement occurs both because, but also in spite of your presence.

They also refer to the type of behaviours encoded in the ritual of art gallery attendance. They demand that the audience co-author not just their meaning, but also their audio-visual output, which requires a different level of interactivity on the part of the audience. This is art about active not just intellectual engagement. This is art which does not exist without a willing participant. Yet having asked the audience to behave differently, Stanza immediately puts them at ease by offering these works as editioned objects which might well sit alongside paintings and perhaps discuss the aesthetic common-ground of paint and pixel. It seems Stanza intends to build a new relationship between artwork and audience, but not by reconstructing the physical architecture of art history which he leaves very much intact.

The art historian Dana Arnold claims that the architecture and associated activity of the art gallery generate “the cultural life of a society”. With these works Stanza provokes the participants in the ‘cultural life of society’ to reconstruct a range of naturalised urban behaviours whilst rebuilding not just a few of their ideas about art production and presentation.

All images copyright (c) Stanza. Do not reproduce or use for blogs without written permission. All rights reserved. The copyright for any material published on this website is reserved. Any duplication or use of objects such as images, diagrams and texts is not permitted without Stanza's written agreement.

Contact Stanza

Stanza at sublime.net

My main site is stanza.co.uk