Weather or Not: Current Conditions, 2022 (data visualization using live weather tower data) © Gene Gort, commissioned by Five Points Art Center
Gene Gort’s exhibition Drawn to Code opens at Five Points TDP Gallery in Torrington, Connecticut on Friday, June 24th, with a reception from 6 pm to 8 pm. The exhibition runs through July 30, 2022. There is a virtual artist talk on Friday, July 8th from 6:30 pm, moderated by Matthew Best.
Gort writes about his work, “In 2015, I began working with computer programming as a means to produce ‘drawings’”; images generated from computer code which create animations, data visualizations, and digital prints resulting from these programs. I am drawn to the concepts of interactivity, repetition, variability, and unpredictability the process allows. This work continues to evolve using strict geometries, gestural images, and photographic/videographic sources. When presenting the work in a gallery setting, I show both the animations and the digital prints to demonstrate the process.
Using computing as a mode of working has also been realized in multi-media performance projects with a number of composers, dancers, and musicians, and has become central to my practice. Computing doesn’t replace the artistic gesture but extends it, creating options not achievable previously in my work. Documentation of this work is accessible at https://genegort.com/NEWwebSTUFF/CodeProjects.html.”
In addition to prints of code-based works, the exhibition includes a work commissioned by Five Points Art Center called Weather or Not: Current Conditions “for permanent installation on the new campus and as an online web project. It collects weather data (wind speed, direction, temperature, radiation, humidity, time of day,…) from a tower on the grounds and combines it with live RSS news feeds from CNN, New York Times, Al Jazeera, and Fox News into a live data visualization.” More information about the project may be found on Five Points’ and Gene Gort's websites.
Five Points Gallery is located at 33 Main St., Torrington, CT.