Sheets is a generative artwork that displays the explicit mathematical logic underlying its own visuals. Revealing the data that drives the artwork, as part of the artwork itself, is a unique approach to algorithmic art that is reductive and pure – yet simultaneously vast and overwhelming. Here, the generative process produces infinite visual tables that evoke the ever-rising power of the spreadsheet, and the endless datafication of our world. Both operationally and visually inspired by large table-based datasets that are designed to simplify complex systems, Sheets instead amplifies its own complexity.
Using the vernacular of spreadsheet interfaces, early computing displays, and the specification diagrams for printed circuit boards, these works repurpose functional calculations to provoke more than it solves – creating intricate and illegible compositions that remind us of the unknowable logic shaping our world. Like nature, and reality itself, the resulting pile of maths in this series are perhaps best accepted and admired for their beauty and sense of logic, rather than continuously dissected and understood in full.
In response to each individual’s perception of beauty and order, collectors of these generative artworks will choose their own unique output from the artist’s core algorithm – six of which will be pre-selected by the artist and translated into special engraved metal plate works.
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