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What do you do if you are a web developer with the soul of artist? Do you go home in the evenings, take care of feeding the family and do your household chores, then paint with any remaining time? Caroline C. Blaker does that. But she does something else, too. She takes all that info about PHP and JQuery floating around in her brain from her day job and uses it to generate a new form of conceptual art she calls Twitterscapes.
Twitterscape February 20, 2010 2:14PM by Caroline C. Blaker
The images are of pixels created from Twitter information. Characters and symbols are translated into pixels of color. I asked her if the pixels of color could be translated back into language and she told me they could not. She did tell me the red pixels represent @ signs. If you watch the Twitterscape visualizations on a computer, the image changes every few seconds.
Blaker began "painting with pixels" using paints she applied using a rubber spatula to create blocks of color about an inch wide. You can see some of her work with paint on canvas in Diptych and The Kinetics of Connection. You can also see some of her work behind her in this video. I caught her explaining a bit about Twitterscapes to someone on the first night of her showing in the Chroma Studios gallery in Albuquerque.
Caroline C. Blaker describes Twitterscapes from Virginia DeBolt on Vimeo.
I hope you caught that last statement, where Blaker said that the Twitterscapes you see now are just the baseline for what she can expand this concept to include in future art projects.
Some Q & A with Caroline C. Blaker
I asked Caroline a few questions about herself and her work.
Q: Tell me about your background.
A: I am a web developer and an artist. I have been an a painter since the age of 9 and have had general interest in many forms of art since before I can remember. I grew up in Connecticut. I studied ceramics in college (Washington University in St. Louis) where the conceptual implications of temperature, fire and use of earth materials turned me onto installation. I came to web development after graduation knowing that I would need the skills to promote myself. I have been a web developer professionally since 2005. At this point in time, I have spent 2 years working for a local web development company in a lead programmer capacity with project management responsibility.
Q: How do you reach this point in your artistic journey?
A: It began as my extra-curricular study of web design (you know, apart from waiting tables and going out as a college grad too many nights a week) took on more and more of my creative time and began to halt my painting practice in the studio. Even when I did set aside time for painting, I realized I was thinking about web development and my latest roadblock to solve, as I would run into them frequently and very much enjoy the problem solving aspect of development that painting without authority could not provide. My paintings lacked vitality, development, and resolve, which I determined to be going to web development. Of course, I soon started working as a web developer and the skills I had been developing on my own took my career to its first real step.
I decided that I needed to bring my use of creativity full-circle back to the painting studio by doing something. That something, I decided, would be to paint actual pixels (in representative square strokes) on the canvas, so that at the very least all residual creativity that might have been discarded from the web process would get a chance of being reused. I began to experiment with the composition of pixels and began to paint them as little individual entities on the canvas.
I knew that ultimately what I would be striving for would be a completely data-driven art form that I could paint like a painting using my expertise of web browsers and the various technologies available to display data on a screen, but for that I would need at the very least a data set and a conceptual framework to position my efforts for some concept. These became rules-in-waiting until I found the Twitter
