Brian Knep- A Reflection

After hearing artist Brian Knep speak about his artwork and philosophy, I have begun to contemplate further into the ideas of new media. 

Brian Knep's art piece, "The Healing Pool" is a large rectangular projection onto the floor. The Image is a moving, growing, organic web that when disrupted by a humans touch is torn apart and then mended back together forming a scar. To me it is similar to human flesh; when torn it heals back together, but will be forever changed and "scarred". When I first viewed this piece it was intriguing. It seemed that for the piece to be whole a persons participation was required. 

After hearing Brian Knep speak about this piece, he stressed that the piece is whole and content just the way it is. Humans are actually disturbing what is actually already whole. It is more about the regeneration of this artwork and how it can heal itself over and over again as it is effected by different people. 

This brings up several points. Brian Knep has created an artwork that does not need to be viewed or interacted with to simply 'be'. This goes against what many people would consider art. Art has always been viewed, been touched, been interacted with, etc. He has created an artistic being, something that can exist on its own. "New media" has helped make this possible. His computer software becomes the "brain" telling the artwork how to mend itself, where it is being torn, where it needs to scar, etc. He has used new media to redefine artwork so that not only are we reacting to it, but it is reacting to us. 

Another aspect of his work that I really enjoy is that much of his work is based on the natural phenomena of emergent behavior. He described this as when geese flock together, they do this according to a set of rules, but not a set structure. Their rules include, fly this close to your neighbor, but not too close, and this far to the left, etc. What this does is create spontaneous, natural patterns. He uses this idea in his Healing series work. He writes certain "rules" into his computer program that will produce his art piece. What fascinates me is that most of the time he does not know how it will exactly turn out. No one as anyway of knowing. There is enough degree of spontaneity and change within the rules, so that the art piece will never look the same. 

This idea of emergent behavior is incredibly interesting to me because I am working with patterns in my own artwork. I am working with creating patterns with the human body and working with illusions of positive and negative shapes. I want to see how I can play with "emergent behavior" in my own artwork. If I could create a 2-d work from the same idea, using set rules that govern what comes next, I could probably end up with something quite interesting.