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Surgical Strike

Liberal arts and the military technology of computation make strange bedfellows. There is a danger that computer art is just the aestheticisation of military ideology, a sugar coating that makes the military-industrial-entertainment complex easier to swallow on the way to the cubicle. This serves business well, but art is not business even if there is a business of art.
These images were made using a computer language that I wrote for the project. The language was derived from military terminology, and the images were meant to be parodies of William Latham’s then-famous swirly evolved computer art. It’s no accident that artistic Darwinism was popular at the same time as social Darwinism. Replacing Latham’s spheres and textures with stealth bombers and IT logos seemed more honest. Introducing the history of software into the background and trapping the image between that and the text of the program that executed to create it in the foreground completed the work.
It’s a concrete allegory.

Click here to see the work.