Steve Hudak has brought the worlds of abstract art and computer coding together for a new exhibition at the Agnes Jamieson Gallery.
The installation is not what people would expect when they walk into an art gallery.
Two large projector screens and televisions bursting with colour give a new look to the space for Pattern, Process and Procedure: Exploring the Computational Sublime.
Hudak said he started coding in 2012 and has worked on this specific exhibition for six years.
“I started to see this role of media and how I wanted to know that material,” he said. “I didn’t want that material (coding/design) to be a mystery to me.”
The program Hudak uses is called processing. It allows him to draw the designs for the art, assign colour palettes and then the computer takes it from there.
He said the art on the screen will never show up the same way twice and the computer is always changing the design to make it its own.
“That’s the fun of it,” said Hudak. “When you build an algorithm, things can happen and change it.”
The crowd at the opening watched the different patterns, colours and movement the computers created.
The event even featured a piece that creates designs using sound in the room. Laurie Carmount, curator, said the gallery likes to explore different avenues of art a few times a year through exhibitions and Hudak’s work does just that.
“We go from something that is quite traditional and jump right into something that is very modern and digital,” she said.
Although Hudak also explores art through painting and sculpting, he said coding allowed him to find a voice in the digital material he was working with and really focus on abstract ideas.
The show continues to Aug. 3.
