The Portfolio of Justin Simoni
Currently Working On
Featured Work
Words (Kerouac)
The Portfolio of Justin Simoni
Words (Kerouac)
Life Lines is a series of drawings, paintings and digital animations stemming form a triptich that I painted called:
Three Versions of Six Life Paths Painted Randomly, Although Patterned, Although Impossible to Fully Foresee and Their Many Interactions and Replusions, Painted With the Help of a Computer Acting as God.
The title itself is sort of a joke, as the paintings themselves are super conceptual and at the time, I think I had a problem with Art for Art's Sake. I probably still do. I also keep changing the title, since I keep forgetting it. The basic premise is that I painted basically the same painting, three times. The lines were figured out using a simple Perl program that I would run on my laptop:
#!/usr/bin/perl
{
my $r = int(rand($ARGV[0]));
redo if $r == 0;
print $r . "\n";
}
This program will give a random number. I would first find a random number to see what side of the square painting to start at, and then which dot to start at and then where to paint and which direction to paint from there. For example, receiving a number, "1" would tell me to draw a line going, "up", "2" right, and so on. I made a rule that the line could not be drawn off the painting and that a line could not cross itself. This will have the affect of having the line become trapped in itself.
As the retarded title of the painting... suggests, each line represents one lifespan and how even though we seem to have control over our own destinies, there's a very small window over which we can actively control what happens to us. Small decisions in our lives may have large impacts later on, we don't really know and the amount of different paths we can live our lives is much too large to really guess.
After I painted these piecess, I took the idea and made an animation of the trptich in a gallery setting, being painted before sillouetted figues. I called this animation, Another Version of, Three Versions... I used this as a support for the paintings themselves. What's simply goofy about all this is that when I have the animation of the paintings running besides the actual paintings I produce a conflict: what should the viewing hold their attention towards? My hypothesis would be to the animation, as movement of the animation has more of a power to gain attention than implied movement of a painting.
View Another Version of Three Versions...
The paintings themselves have the feeling of being very non-organical, as if they were produced first by a computer, instead of the other way around. The animations of the paintings are created the same way as the actual paintings, and will be different each time they're "painted", thus giving a source for an unlimited amount of pieces in this series.