SAN BASE


     

The Canadian artist San Base has invented a new manner of presentation of Art objects using modern computer technology. Basic objects, basic colours, basic principles of their development are put into the picture by an artist. It is just like the picture's DNA. Then a computer works on the picture's individuality, adding more variations and fluctuations of the basic elements and letting them develop with time. San Base call it Cybermatism.

In an interview for Graphics Magazine he has explained: “The idea was simple, to force a picture to live in time, meaning, to turn a static picture into a dynamic one. Dynamic sculpture is known since quite long ago as a branch of the fine art, but the dynamic approach has never been applied to conventional pictures. And moreover, it seemed to be impossible, how one could force paint to vary? Modern technologies came to help that. Instead of traditional canvas, I use LCD computer screen. Basically, the image on the screen is created by the computer. But the subject of the picture, its color and stylistic concept are created by the artist. In other words, the artist creates the aesthetic approach and the basic principles of creation of a picture, and then the computer, based on that, creates millions of variations of the subject. At this stage it is very important to realize that without an artist's imagination, without his creative input, computer can do virtually nothing. Computer does not create a picture. Computer does not add anything on his own into the picture.”

San’s more detailed description of his approach: “First of all, I think out basic idea of the picture (plot, aesthetics etc.) Then I make an algorithm of realization of this plot. Any picture has own unique algorithm (a set of GLSL shaders + set of color maps etc.). The main initial purpose of the whole project was to achieve highest possible diversity of images and to go from their typical shape. Most of digital images available nowadays are quite monotonous style. Pictures might be different, I.a. they might apply various colors and shapes, but the overall style remain basically the same. It means, it's quite difficult to recognize any particular digital picture and to clearly distinguish it from others.  At least if you take a look at pictures at my Web-site, you might notice, most of them are performed in substantially different manners, although created with the same computer program. Apparently the power of a computer CPU turned to be not enough for a good performance, therefore the GPGPU technology has been applied, I.e. calculations are performed by the video-card's GPU. It makes the running speed some 50-100 times faster. The result is 20-30 frames per second with a screen resolution of 2560x1600. It means, the result is not just a picture, but rather a some kind of video-show.”



More at the artist's web site