10 Aug Things that happen sometimes.

float x = 0;
void setup() {
size(400, 400);
background(255);
stroke(255);
}
void draw() {
line(x, 200, x, 100);
x = x + 1;
if (x > width) {
x = 0;
}
// sometimes we decide to change the line color
if (random(100) > 70) {
// now we decide if to use black or white
if (random(100) > 50) {
stroke(0);
}
else {
stroke(255);
}
}
}

(https://funprogramming.org/18-Things-that-happen-sometimes.html)

Order is appealing: lists, spreadsheets, alphabetically arranged bookcases. It’s not to say things should be tidy, or minimal, just that the information to hand is maybe best when in its most efficient form. In a previous life I thought I’d be a computer programmer.

For a while I quite regularly did soduku puzzles. But what was more fun was making a spreadsheet that answered them for me. Or at least made for minimal educated guesses. Minimised, organised, made more efficient. I enjoy starting a procedure and finding the most efficient way of doing it, jigsaw puzzles, arranging buttons, filing. When I was about twelve, I wrote a Basic program that had all elements of my (limited at the time) wardrobe and would print out a list of possible combinations given certain boundaries – like temperature, event, favourite colour that day.

Of course, life doesn’t fit in boxes like this, things bleed out, slip, shift. It’s fine, the fun is in working out the puzzle, a solution for efficiency. (Agnes Martin)

I find myself drawing grids over works, shifting pixels and moving in and out of tiny details. Pixelating the image simplifies the scene, makes clearer the contrasts and colours, but so much is lost. The hard lines of computer generated pixels are colder, replicable, efficient perhaps. Once they’re drawn, painted, the colours bleed, I mix up a square or two and the image is lost. Maybe it would be easier to code the decisions for processing a landscape in some way. This view should be this size. It moves in this way.

Could I take a photo from my phone and send it through some articulated algorithm that makes it my experience of this view. An algorithm like Google has. It knows how old I am, how many kids I have, what my day looks like, my heart rate, where I spend my time, how I spend my time, it searches my photos and picks out my friends, my loved ones, compiles videos for me, it knows before me what I might want to do, where I might want to go. Could it tell me how I experience a place? Make me an image from a simple phone photo that is the painting I want to have painted? What information would it need?

I worked in SEO for years. Watching the increasingly complicated algorithms that Google runs in a frantic impetus to guess what you want before you know, to throw the highest bidder directly into your line of site, into your brain. Early on you could trick the algorithms. Hidden words, white on white, spam text, bolded words and hyperlinks. Clean code helped, following rules, keeping your head down. But eventually (and super quickly) Google caught up and surpassed any trick, any slight of hand. It was no longer a game it was a stacked gamble, and as always the house wins.