Digital art

These pictures were created with Adobe Photoshop by designer/artist Marcel Ritschel in 2002/03. They laid some of the technical conceptual groundwork for later studies in the field of shape grammar, parametrics, and generative design.

Strategy / Technique

The abstract works involved both a designerly and painterly approach to image-making. Each image involved the following stages: (1) A number of digitized photographs were "pretreated" with certain filters and layered on top of each other; (2) The blending options of each layer were intuitively adjusted to generate a "liquid space;" (3) Additive and subtractive visual editing.

Concept / Content

The artist had produced what appears to be a non-figurative picture some five years earlier. Liquid Crystal , however, is comprised of digitally manipulated photographs of graffiti art which itself already contained abstract elements. These abstract works are different because they bear no relation in terms of content to their constituent photographs.

Abstraction is relative and also depends on the wish of the observer to decode an image into meaningful associations. The last composition of the series, The Veil , is certainly far from objectless, its synaesthetic labyrinth held together as much by a profusion of beings as by the meandering organic lines. Moreover, these images all exhibit a striking spontaneity which reflects their event-driven workflows - that is, structural shifts on the XY-plane (Stage 1) and "gestural abstractions" on the Z-plane (Stage 2).

Why make abstract digital art? Ritschel wanted to investigate the "crawlspace" between the interface and the ones and zeros, but only found another interface.

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