!= Human Doing is a fully algorithmic work. However, the mark making instrument is not geometry or equations. True to its focus on our being - our deepest, truest, most intuitive selves - the work is drawn in symbols, 58 in total, using a font that I specifically built for the project. I used the upper and lower case letters and common punctuation marks of the English language as the basis of the font, but the glyphs do not correspond to any known system. Five randomly selected, non-repeating glyphs are used in each output, four as the layers that build the image and a fifth as a signature chop in the lower right hand corner.

The font was created using small details from one of my analog photographic chemigrams.  In the chemigram process black and white darkroom paper is repeatedly exposed to chemicals and light in the presence of a resist.  Intricate patterns slowly develop, requiring patience and close attention.  The process is, for me, a perfect foil for coding, steeped as it is in watching and acting rather than in logic. It's all sloshing trays, stained fingers, pungent smells, and quick movements into and out of the light.

When making chemigrams, I am totally in my body, in the moment, in touch with materiality.  When coding I get just as lost, but in my mind and in my intellect. Forced from my chair to attend to an interruption, I wonder why I am so stiff, not realizing the passage of hours. Merging those two sides of myself and my practice - analog and digital - in this project seemed a perfect marriage, and an apt metaphor for exploring the necessity we face in life of both being and doing. A necessity that many of us struggle to balance in a world that seems to demand a constant frenzy of doing. Further emphasizing the tension between the two, I have intentionally scaled the glyphs to the point of extreme distortion in building the layers of the work - from something small and detailed and demanding close attention, comes something large and expressive and demanding an emotional response.

May != Human Doing provide for you an opportunity to let go, fall in, and enjoy an interlude of simply being.

Love and creativity always,

Wanda