A “Digital Art Revolution” Interview with Artist Max Chandler.

Max Chandler studied math at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Chinese at the Defense Language Institute and attended graduate art school in Taiwan. He was an intern for several years to internationally known artist Chen Ting-shih. Working in both hardware and software he participated in ten patents, including designs for milk cartons, gymnastic equipment, and scanners. His software projects include Visicorp products and Sim City. His artwork has been shown nationally and internationally.

This is a recent interview with Max Chandler, conducted by Scott Ligon, author of “Digital Art Revolution, Creating Fine Art with Photoshop”, specifically for this blog.

You are a true renaissance man. You grew up on a farm. You studied math at MIT. You studied art in Taiwan.

I realize renaissance man is a very popular term for a person with varied interests, but I dislike it for a couple of reasons. First, it diminishes the accomplishes of the true renaissance men from out of history -- a few hundred remarkable people completely changed the direction of the western world in less than a century. Second, the renaissance man problem (expanding the base of knowledge) is exactly opposite of our problem today. We are making so many advances in science and understanding what it means to be human today, that there is no way a single person can learn it all. Our challenge today is to choose a few areas and keep up. Unfortunately, we live in an era when many people are choosing the "Dumb as I want to be" option, which can only fail and make us look silly to future generations.

How have your varied interests and accomplishments influenced your creative work? Is there a common thread?

Although my art training is very different from what one learns in an American art school today, it did stress being aligned with one's history and that is a big part of what I try to do. My work is even much more technical than a lot of "New Media" work, but the end result is a painting that fits well next to paintings with a more traditional methodology. Because of my exposure to high tech work and high tech people I understand that this kind of work is just as creative as work in the arts.

What I try to do is make art that is science influenced at very fundamental levels and creative in both technology and painting. The single thing that separates me from all other technology artists is my unwillingness to give up paints and brushes (which are very inconvenient technologically).

Many of the art eras that we think of as the best in our history had a very similar relationship to the science of the time. We have already mentioned the renaissance, but impressionists were very aware of new knowledge of light and light mixing for colors, and also the new chemistry of dyes. Cubism was a response to photography.

You actually construct robots that make physical paintings. What prompted you to take this approach?

Today nearly a billion cell phones are active on our planet. I think art that doesn't have a connection to smart devices and computing is just not relevant to what distinguishes our lives. A successful robot requires getting your act together in mechanics, electronics and computer programming. When you combine that with artistic goals, I think you are making work that could never have been made before and that is deeply connected to the intellectual life of our new century.

How specific is your programming and how much of the painting is left to chance?

The programming inside the robot is very similar to Photoshop in its concept of image. The image is produced from combining layers of images (the image basics are vectors rather than pixels however). The fundamental of my work is an object that I call a Figure. This can be a series of points that describe an object, or a mathematical function, basic shapes, or sophisticated output from a scientific modeling program. For instance, both of my images in your book ("From the Roof" and "Big and Blue") combine hand-digitized profiles of prominent buildings in the neighborhood of my New York studio and mathematically generated skylines. These Figures are combined with layers that are very similar to Photoshop layers. Also the robot is capable of affine transformations (changes you see on the image menu) resizing (scaling), flipping, rotating, and so on. Another part of the image is another program or programs that run on a PC and output Figures for the robot. Two of the sources are very graphic. I have written a program that lets me draw lines (in layers) on a PC and then save that in a form the robot can understand.  Another graphic program I have written reads 3D model files and projects them onto a surface, then outputs the result into a form the robot understands. I also produce images by combining a mathematic fundamental with another non-image source and then interpret that as an image.

Image         Math fundamental   Organizing method

Cactus        logarithmic spirals     cellular automata (tissue growth)

Buildings     manhattan lines        music (midi files)

My robots are capable of mathematically precise movements beyond the ability of people to paint by hand. Randomness enters my work in three ways. One of the interesting characteristics of robotic movement is that the robot will never actually execute a command it receives. Due to many, many real world factors -- friction, reaction forces from the brushes, etc. the robot will not actually arrive at its true destination. In some of my robots, this error is very small (less than half a millimeter) and some of my robots are made to play with this factor and have a deliberate limping walk.  Second, I also sometimes introduce additional randomness in the programming as well (this is particularly visible in the textures I make to represent cactus). The third way is that a robot painting is a kind of performance collaboration between me and the robot. I have to prepare colors and brushes ahead of the actual need from the robot -- there is very little time to load the next brush and this affects the image. I also load the robot with multiple brushes sometimes, to get color mixing and brush interaction going that is planned, but not highly predictable. A work develops of a long period of time because I have to work on sections that avoid having the robot walk through wet paint. I have written a few articles that have been published in journals that talk about it.

How is Photoshop used in the process?

I was very fortunate as a teenager to work for some color quality control experts. I got a very thorough foundation in understanding color physics, color preparation, and color matching at a professional level far beyond what we learn in art training. I am also a devotee of Josef Albers intuitive approach to color.  I think this may make me a certifiable color nut. All of my monitors have color calibration hardware that in addition to "calibrating" the monitor to an accurate color profile also measures ambient light intensity and white balance and continuously adjusts the monitors. And I mean all of my monitors, even my laptop. I use Photoshop to develop palettes for use in a painting or series of paintings early in the design process. I can make many, many color combination and interaction tests in Photoshop. Typically the square inside another square, finding the true visual complimentary color, etc. After that, I use Liquitex's great little program Pixel2Paint, that gives me a starting way to mix the colors I want. I then do a number of test charts, so that I am sure the dry color is the color I wanted. One of the hardest things for me as an artist is to avoid getting seduced by the lovely wet color of the paint that is going to shift to something else in a few minutes.

You were an intern for several years to internationally known artist Chen Ting-shih. How did this influence your work?

Chen Ting-shih was a truly remarkable person, who overcame disabling obstacles that would completely overwhelm most of us. He was a deaf-mute that could only communicate by reading and writing Chinese, a language that has no sign language and in which lip reading in virtually impossible. And yet he was a prominent artist and poet. There are more than a dozen books about him several in English. He has public art work in Taiwan, Japan, Korea, France, Italy and the US. He won an international competition to make stained glass windows for the Capitol building of Colorado and has murals in airports in Asia and Europe. There is a sculpture by him in a park in Venice, Italy. He is best known for very large wood block prints that combine calligraphy and landscape imagery. He described himself as a geology-aware landscape artist and his work reflects the forces of nature as well as the appearance. He was also a renowned calligrapher and extremely accomplished in traditional Chinese painting.

In addition to uncountable life lessons, he also taught me his organic ideas of composition that are similar to Kandinsky's "inner necessity" ideas. Also, ahead of his time he was very strong on "intention" and having strong goals as a way of art making. In all of his work, prints, painting, calligraphy and poetry, he achieves control of seeming "accidents". Things that appear cracked or broken in his wood blocks were very carefully constructed. He folded, wrinkled and rubbed painting surfaces, so that the textures and edges often looked accidental, but they were planned and prepared for.

You participated in several patents. What are they for and how did you participate?

I participated in patents in milk carton manufacturing, gymnastic equipment manufacturing, some electronic parts, but mostly in software UI methods, and graphical modeling methods. These all reflect the day jobs I had as I raised a family. Except for the milk cartons and gymnastic stuff, there is a common thread of graphically related computer work. I worked as an individual contributor engineer, but mostly as a director of software development or VP of engineering. Some of the products I made are mechanical CAD software, electronic CAD software, high-end scanners, film recorders, spreadsheets, file transfer and synchronization. I always tried to find jobs with the best people in the field and got to work closely with several of the true pioneers of the digital revolution.

You’ve worked on software development for SIM CITY and several other projects. Can you tell us more about this? What specifically did you do?

I had become tired and burned out with the constant struggle between marketing and engineering in high tech companies and decided to become an individual contributor instead. I heard there was a job in the "High Technology Group" at Maxis (the early company for Sim City). This was about the most dream job a programmer could imagine. They wanted someone to examine new high technology coming out in graphics cards and new algorithms in artificial intelligence, artificial life, and 3D modeling. I said yes, long before there was even a mention of salary. I did work on genetic algorithms, 3D, and character designs that are still used in SimCity, the Sims and related products. I also made plug-ins for Photoshop and 3D programs for the art department.

Many people might feel stretched pretty thin exploring so many different things. What are the benefits to having so many and varied creative endeavors? How do you juggle them successfully?

It is important to remember that many of my endeavors took place over time. I did not do all of that stuff simultaneously. I think of myself as working from a small base of interests that are important for making art that reflects our lives today. I think artists that ignore the digital nature of much of our lives are missing out. I deliberately used basic robot kits, usually Lego, to construct my robots. I want my method to be transparently available. Most adults today miss this, but most kids get it immediately. I have been a guest with several junior high level robotics groups that make art robots. Last summer, I gave a class at a museum in Joplin, MO on science inspired art and painting with robots. One very interested young man was too young to be in the class, but I let him "hang out" with us anyway. A few months later he called me to let me know that now that he had been in the first grade for five months that he was good at art and math, too.

I think people who think art is a place to "hide out" from math or science will not produce art that is relevant.  Very few or the artists that we think of as great did that. Cezanne, for instance, was a good mathematician and understood trigonometry and 3D geometry at a level that is used for movie special effects today. I have been involved in art and mathematics since early childhood, so this is not new for me.

What do you think are the most profound creative changes and opportunities presented by digital technology?

I think that good digital art is first good art. The goals of digital art should not be different. But all good art does reflect its medium and it’s important that digital art do this as well. Photoshop, for instance, has many strengths as an art-making tool. Good Photoshop art looks like Photoshop art -- it builds upon the layering and filtering that have not been available before. I think Photoshop provides the first really good way to utilize photography as an element of a larger vision that we need in our image-soaked world today. For people who want to go further, digital techniques offer unique interactive and social experiences. The challenge here is to be art and not just curiosity.

Artists like Gavin Levin using "Processing" or other artist's software are producing very interesting work. This work is very strong in innovation, but still achieves the emotional and intellectual ties we expect from art.

Can you tell us anything about your creative career highlights that wasn't covered by the other questions?

My life is very much like a traditional artist. I draw almost everyday and have been doing so continuously since before I could walk. I visit museum and parks several times a week and read voraciously. I almost never watch TV.

What are your current projects?

For the last year I have been working mostly on software to expand the graphics vocabulary of my work. I mentioned the drawing program and the 3D model program earlier. If you Google “robot art” you will mostly get pictures of robots painted by people. I think its a cruel joke that Google keeps putting me in that category. So now I am developing a body of work in which robots paint people.

You’ve explored a lot. Anything else you’d like to tackle in the future that you haven't already?

Hundreds of things intrigue me. We live in a truly amazing time. We have actually seen planets outside of our solar system. We understand more about how all of us are closely related in ecology and genetics. I think the new E8 symmetry may replace the standard model in particle physics. The US might actually rise from 38th to 30th in health care in our lifetime.

I want to apply my newly developing 3D modeling to my cactus body of work. Specifically, I did some camping in the mountains near San Diego that had been through wild fires about three years ago. The cactus in that area were severely burned to the extent that they look almost melted. And yet, in a short while, they have new growth and are beginning to recover. So I want to make my cactus work so that I think everyone understands it’s basically about survival, especially survival in hard times, and to expand it into being about recovery.

I think the static view of a person we usually see in painting and photography does not match our actual experience of understanding someone. I want to develop a "data base" of many views of a person and combine the features and shapes in a statistical way combined with chance sort of a stochastic cubism.

Learn more by visiting Max Chandler’s website: maxchandler.com

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