Hi Nick, thanks so much for coming to talk to us today.
How would you describe '77 Million Paintings'?
and the concept behind it?
The way I generally describe it to someone
who hasn't seen it is as a very slowly moving
secular stained-glass window.
It's in a very dark room and it looks like it's floating
and it is very highly formed, the arrangement of the monitors
is very highly formed, but what's happening inside is very free.
So, when it's moving slowly it's almost imperceptibly changing
and I often walk into certain rooms in which it's playing
and I think 'That would look great in a church.'
But of course it has no religious reference,
it just has that feeling.
The concept behind it spans back thirty years.
Brian's been doing generative installations for that long.
Initially he would use a bank of projectors,
you know industrial, really powerful projectors,
and put all of the slides into carousels which were
of different lengths so that the overlap
would be different every time you saw it.
Part of the main concepts behind generative art,
and this piece in particular, it's almost completely impossible
to see the same thing twice because of the amount
of combinations that are possible.
With the old method of using slides I think it repeated itself
after fourteen years of continuous play.
With the software version it's almost impossible
to repeat itself, especially in a configuration
where there are three versions running.
So, the concept behind it is to create something that is
very slowly moving so when you look at it, it could be
a painting but then you look at it again and think
�Oh, hang on, it's changed a bit' and then you
look at it again and it's completely different.
In the initial software we had a speed control which would
slow it down so you really, really couldn't tell
it was changing and it would change over a period of hours
to a faster speed which was still slow,
but it's very difficult to notice that it's changing.
.