COVER STORY
Strange Visions Of Bangkok
Bob Stratton is one of the few people who actually like Bangkok’s tangle of electrical wires. Understandably, because without them, he wouldn’t have the bold lines which add graphic composition to his kaleidoscopic artwork, currently on display at Galeria Sucio. In his first solo exhibition in Bangkok, the digital artist presents Bangkok like you’ve never seen it before — creating pictures within pictures like matryoshka dolls — with “Krungthep Fever Dream”.
The 39 images on display are all a burst of visual energy — where fragmented visages of Bangkok are folded over one another repeatedly to create abstract and psychedelic forms. If you were to put the beads of Bangkok into a giant kaleidoscope, these are the very sort of images that could be expected, but with extremely crisp details down to every rusty metal bar, noodle-shop sign or motorcycle helmet, as you get up close to inspect these high-res prints. Most of the manipulated locations include iconic signs or architectural structures from the streets, with hot pops of colour giving a punch of geometric order, while rustier junkyards create a subdued, dark and moody feel. Then there are mere pipes that have been replicated and reshuffled so much as to give an otherworldly, sci-fi impression.
People are rare subjects in his prints, mainly for the grotesque results that are usually unappealing to look at.
“But it’s a bit like finding an Easter egg if you do find one,” he jokes, pointing to a man on his tuk-tuk. “It works better in really rich urban environments that are kind of chaotic visually because of the way it combines bits and pieces of patterns. Nature scenes like trees, forests and bushes don’t really work because they just look like really bad photographs.”
To create these images, Stratton manipulates photos that he’s taken himself with a software extension that he has also written up himself. Having taught printmaking at the MFA computer-art programme at the School of Visual Arts in New York before he moved to Thailand in 2011, “Krungthep Fever Dream” is a mash of Stratton’s long-honed fine-art skills coupled with the new technologies.
“As soon as I discovered digital art, I realised this is what I really loved,” says the artist, who is also a designer and programmer. “I love playing with variations and parameters of things and seeing what combinations work. I like the impossibilities of the manipulations.”
Although it is his computer that is doing most of the heavy lifting, the process of manipulating a single photo can take up to a week.
“A lot of the time, it’s just asking the algorithm to surprise you,” explains Stratton. “I have a bunch of buttons and sometimes I just sit there all day pressing. It’s like the computer asking me a thousand times, ‘Do you like this?’, and I say no like a thousand times before I finally say OK. I generate about a thousand, keep about a hundred and post 20 on my website.
As opposed to a painter, who is using a skill to paint something, I’m sort of curating the work of the algorithm.”
But despite having differing processes from those of traditional artists, the US native explains that creating digital art shares a lot of common ground with printmaking, something he also used to practise and teach.
“Both of them are essentially reproduction techniques. Before, when I was a printmaker, I’d just take images and put them through a bunch of processes like with silkscreen to block out certain colours or with etching by working with stronger acids or leaving it in the bath longer to get deeper colours. You can have one single photo and there are a thousand ways to turn it into silkscreen.
“With digital art, you can write your own program and make your own tools, but with printmaking, you use tools that have been around for thousands of years and learn how to tweak them to make them work for you. It’s now faster and easier to do and you can do more complicated things. I’m not a genius programmer and I know nothing about a lot of little things, but things got easier and cheaper and this has made a huge difference in terms of what I can do. You don’t need to be the best electrical engineer and you can get microprocessors for US$30 [950 baht]. This whole do-it-yourself movement and answers all over internet message boards means I don’t need the partners I used to need.”
There is one thing about digital art that he’s not too keen on, however.
“What I do miss about fine art is creating an object,” he says. “I’m still stuck to the physicality of it and it is very important to me. I don’t want my work on your TV, so I haven’t really embraced the whole digital thing, where I just give you a floppy and say, ‘Here’s your art’. A lot of digital art is just on the internet. You go to the webpage and the art is there in the browser or showing on a monitor. I’m not particularly interested in that aspect of it.”
I have a bunch of buttons and sometimes I just sit there all day pressing. It’s like the computer asking me a thousand times, ‘Do you like this?’, and I say no a thousand times before I finally say OK
This exhibition marks a welcome return to fine art after Stratton’s long career in the digital and design world he found himself in when the web started to come around in the 90s. Stratton has started numerous design and technology companies in New York when the internet was considered brand-new, and has also worked on digital installations, back when those were still a novelty. He also broke creative ground in 2002, with a technology-themed bar called Remote Lounge in the East Village of Manhattan. Banking on the budding popularity of webcamming back in the early 2000s, one of the bar’s main pulls was letting people message, see and talk to each other through the consoles, TVs, phones and channels all over the bar.
“We did a lot of video manipulations and remixed them live and looped it,” he remembers. “You could go in and spy on people because there were cameras everywhere. Hired actors or just ourselves would go in to mess with people, and it was this funny combination of sociological experiment, flirting and technology. It was pretty fun.” Stratton clearly has covered wide ground when it comes to wowing people using technology, but does he think art in this era has to about finding new techniques and electronics in order to be fresh?
“I think it can be, he says. “I’d hate to see just one thing for art. Some of the painters create beautiful paintings on massive canvases and I love to see that kind of work. I like work that’s conceptual. And I like work that takes advantage of new media, but I think for different reasons and at times. I think there’s room for all of it. As digital media progresses and develops, there are new opportunities for new types of expression to develop, and good artists will see that and start something startlingly new. It’s one type of surprise, and that’s wonderful.”
“Krungthep Fever Dream” is running until Feb 13 at Galeria Sucio, Sukhumvit 39. Open Tues-Sun, 11am-5pm. For more information, call 086-0966673 or 083-9599915.