Natural Language is a hybrid studio/programming project exploring the creative process through language–mining the gap between linguistic description and the direct experience of images, objects, and events. Textual descriptions–catalogued, parsed, and analyzed with language processing tools–are used as handles to manipulate diverse collections of material, and to guide formal decisions as to the final structure of pieces. Each object is a collaboration between the artist and computer: the computer responding to the artist’s input with candidate projects, and the artist manufacturing them in turn.
This project is an effort to directly locate the computer in the studio situation, reacting to a perceived seperation between engineering and studio practices, and to postulate new roles for computer technologies in the creative process. Building on the degree of personal involvement and implication of identity developed in the Megahal Grandmommy and Father-Daughter Art Show projects, this new work extends those strategies into the realm of database operations. Natural Language explores the articulation (and archiving) of ideas and influences as a form of self-analysis and psychological performance, and situates a computational language processing system as an intervening force in the creative process.
Language Processing System and Resultant Artifacts
Installed at Four Walls Gallery, San Diego, from February 14 – April 11, 2009.