Simon Ingram

This work consists of multiple parts:

1. SPACE painting #9
2. Monochrome in C ( a machine makes a painting)

1. video recording
2. monochrome painting.

SPACE painting #9 develops a kinetic sense of pattern and randomness, qualities have been said to characterise the structure of informational flow. The work was made using a combination of software and a device that ‘paints’ (or sprays) oil paint from an image file onto a canvas (The Paint Machine). These image files are made using painting and 3-D software; the "weightlessness" of their image production is supplemented by "frictionless" nature of a machine which paints without the friction or drag associated with a paint brush.

The video recording of Monochrome in C (a machine makes a painting), symbolically returns both paintings to their origins in digital processes. A video recording showing a blank canvas being painted in cyan is presented on a G4 Apple 12 inch powerbook computer.

The work is installed in the corner of the gallery, acknowleding Malevich's installation of a painting in the corner of 0.10 The Last Futurist Exhibition in Petrograd (1915). Acknowledgment is also given to Robert Morris’ Box with the Sound of its Own Making (1961), an object containing a sound recording of its own fabrication.

The computer assumes a wall bound object status that relates it to painting while it remains the means to digitally present the making of a painting by a machine. In doing so it offers dialogue on painting as a C21 electronic/digital form. A monochrome in cyan is also presented, this is the painting shown in the video recording.

Notes drawn from: Simon Ingram, Frictionless painting (social colour) artist notes, 2003.