Creative Cogitation

In this fifth install­ment of the Social Media Birds series, I explore binary with birds. As peo­ple have talked about the pre­ced­ing paint­ings I have been asked, “What do the ones and zeros mean?” Yes, I did write a code in ASCII binary, and, yes, it does mean some­thing, and I have no prob­lem with telling the viewer what the binary means. But… Like all art, it’s in the eye of the beholder who is free to apply what­ever inter­pre­ta­tion they want to the paint­ing includ­ing the code. I could have put the actual words in the paint­ing, but I chose to put rep­re­sen­ta­tions of words instead. That is one rea­son for the binary, being lit­eral with­out being lit­eral. That there is this abstrac­tion of lan­guage is suf­fi­cient. I would like the viewer to explore mean­ing a lit­tle more deeply than the face value. What are those birds talk­ing about? Why is one bird orange? Are canaries a valid way to rep­re­sent “Social Media?” Is cyber-communication real, or just a fac­sim­ile of real? Feel free to come up with your own, ques­tions, answers, inter­pre­ta­tions and “code;” after all, how many peo­ple can actu­ally read ASCII binary just to look at it? Your story could be bet­ter than mine.

ASCII Bird, by Jake Beck­man. 80 birds are encoded with the binary messages.

In this paint­ing I took off on a tan­gent, rep­re­sent­ing the binary code with a code. Each bird rep­re­sents three dis­tinct pos­si­bil­i­ties and there­fore three dis­tinct binary states. The bird can be perched or fly­ing, the bird can be black or white and the bird can face left or right. This allowed me to layer three dif­fer­ent “mes­sages” in the binary coded by the states of the birds. You don’t need ones and zeros, you just need some­thing that can be dis­tinctly one thing or another.

Beyond that I broke with using bright col­ors and also laid the birds out in a grid pat­tern to re-enforce the “code.” I think it has a vaguely Egypt­ian feel. If you want to know what the binary means, you can check it the ASCII Bird page on my web­site, where I have decoded the messages.

What do you think? Which one do you like best so far?

Update: Details about ASCII Bird, size etc., can be found on its art page at AKAJake.com

Jake

Artist, AKAJake.com Come Expe­ri­ence the Art!

The art work in this blog is fed­er­ally copy­righted. All repro­duc­tion and pub­lish­ing copy­rights are retained by the artist. Images are not to be copied, re-distributed, imi­tated, derived OR oth­er­wise used in any form with­out the explicit writ­ten per­mis­sion of the artist.