Layer Tennis fascinates me. Two digital artists bounce graphical designs back and forth, sharing the layers with each other, allowing for continued evolution of the image.
Joshua Davis, the clear winner (in my eyes) of this week’s composition, had a fascinating Apple Pro profile written about him:
Davis creates electronically generated graphic compositions of almost unimaginable complexity and individuality. Equally at home with print and electronic media, he builds his own Flash-based programs to combine and recombine colors borrowed from nature with forms that include organic shapes, text elements, and other symbols.
“Working this way allows me to generate an infinite number of compositions,” Davis explains. “I set the boundaries and the rules, but whatever comes out at the end is a surprise. I don’t know what’s going to happen. It could look cool. It could fail. It could be life-changing. There’s always a surprising sense of discovery with this process, because I’m setting up an environment and allowing a scenario to live within it.”
I take a lot of digital photographs just to extract color. I go to an arboretum here on Long Island at different points in the year and take pictures of the orchid show or the Christmas poinsettias. Nature does a pretty good job of blending. You’ll get a flower that starts with green, goes up to yellow, and blooms red. So already I’ve got a red, a yellow, and a green that all complement each other.
Josh is a catalyst — he harnesses the power of objects in his environment and transforms them.Whether it’s from code or from nature, he mixes together a few ingredients, throws it in the oven, and waits to see what comes out.