Artwork by LIA

The evocation of natural mathematics has been the starting point for much of LIA’s work throughout the years. Ever since the publication of her first pieces in turux.at, to experience or to contemplate her works leads to the discovery of reminiscences of natural forms and phenomena such as the movement of birds, the shapes or the patterns of plants.

LIA is not devel­op­ing a sys­tem­at­ic effort to copy nature. Her goal is cer­tain­ly not to sim­u­late or rebuild nature and its forms, as she doesn’t seek to mod­el her pieces in the shape of plants, the tex­ture of stones or the pat­terns in ani­mal fur. She rather builds her work upon the very same math­e­mat­i­cal struc­tures that are the basis of these nat­ur­al forms and uses these as her build­ing blocks for visu­al pro­gram­ming. What these meet in LIA’s code are often the sim­plest of Euclid­i­an forms, pushed into devel­op­ing exquis­ite images and move­ment through their syn­the­sis with math­e­mat­ics. The rem­i­nis­cences with nature arise much more from these famil­iar struc­tures than from the actu­al final shapes or move­ments. There is evo­ca­tion more than an imi­ta­tion; there is emo­tion­al sim­i­lar­i­ty rather than phys­i­cal resem­blance.

Start­ing from for­mu­las of vari­able com­plex­i­ty, much of LIA’s cre­ative work stands in the joy and curios­i­ty of explor­ing the evo­lu­tion of algo­rith­mic trans­for­ma­tions oper­at­ed on the start­ing ele­ments or over new objects that were spawned by those over time. As nature evolves, LIA’s codes also do. As autonomous agents inter­act in nature, so do LIA’s algo­rithms inside of her pieces, devel­op­ing com­plex enti­ties of mes­mer­iz­ing beau­ty.

There­fore, abstrac­tion in LIA’s pieces becomes more than some­thing strict­ly of the intel­lec­tu­al domain, it turns into some­thing that is not only sym­bol­ic, but some­thing that can be expe­ri­enced in its con­nec­tion to Human nature. If we remem­ber Tolstoi’s asser­tion that the work of art embod­ies the artist’s emo­tions or feel­ings and evokes those in the observ­er of the object, which bet­ter way can there be for doing this than to com­mu­ni­cate using a com­mon lan­guage, the very same code that stands as the basis of Human essence, emo­tions and behav­iors?

LIA devel­ops a very pecu­liar form of dig­i­tal plas­tic arts. Using her tools – the com­put­er and the algo­rithms – she carves her prime mat­ter and manip­u­lates vir­tu­al shapes like a sculp­tor. Like a painter, she uses the screen as a can­vas, not try­ing to sim­u­late some­thing that may be behind or beyond it but explor­ing its two-dimen­sion­al plane and the inter­sect­ing axis of time. Like a chore­o­g­ra­ph­er, she builds con­texts for all forms to coex­ist in har­mon­ic or con­flict­ing motion. The out­come of this process is often not too dis­sim­i­lar to what nature achieves with its own means, nei­ther in process nor out­come.

Miguel Car­val­hais, Por­to, Jan­u­ary 2006

Exhibitions

Awards

→ www.liaworks.com