Creative Cogitation

In my cur­rent Series, Binary Birds, I am explor­ing social media in all of its vari­a­tions.  But the thing about mod­ern social inter­ac­tions is that gen­er­ally we are all com­mu­ni­cat­ing elec­tron­i­cally, via cell phone, face­book, tweets, down­loads, web­sites, emails, inter­net searches, etc.  as opposed to face-to-face.  In my paint­ings I have cho­sen to rep­re­sent all this elec­tronic com­mu­ni­ca­tion using the Amer­i­can Stan­dard Code for Infor­ma­tion Inter­change (ASCII). It is a character-encoding scheme that rep­re­sents text in com­put­ers, com­mu­ni­ca­tions equip­ment, and other devices that use text. Most mod­ern character-encoding schemes are based on ASCII, though they sup­port many more char­ac­ters than did ASCII. 

Nev­er­the­less I have cho­sen rep­re­sen­ta­tions of words, rather than the words them­selves, there­fore their inter­pre­ta­tion is still very much up to the viewer.  If you have a bet­ter story to go with a given paint­ing, by all means use it. 

One of the ques­tions I am asked over an over again is what is with all those zeros and ones.   Some peo­ple are aston­ished to learn they actu­ally form words. ASCII Binary is a 2-state rep­re­sen­ta­tion sys­tem.  In elec­tron­ics, a lot of oper­a­tions are pred­i­cated on whether some­thing is off or on.  Off or On are two dis­tinct pos­si­ble states and binary encod­ing is specif­i­cally related to this 2-state sys­tem.   ASCII uses groups of 8 2-state bits, either zeros or ones, to rep­re­sent the let­ters of the alpha­bet.  It is a very spe­cific cod­ing sys­tem, which is dis­tinct from other binary cod­ing sys­tems; there are oth­ers.  In my works, each group of 8 zeros and ones also rep­re­sent a sin­gle let­ter of the alpha­bet, or a num­ber, or a char­ac­ter space  or punc­tu­a­tion.  This coded mes­sage is gen­er­ally related to the sub­ject of the paint­ing and fre­quently rep­re­sents the name of the painting. 

Very often peo­ple think binary is exclu­sively rep­re­sented by zeros and ones.  But step out­side the box; binary can be rep­re­sented by any 2 states that are dis­tinct.  In my paint­ing ASCII Bird I rep­re­sent 2 states using birds three dif­fer­ent ways to con­vey three mes­sages coded into the paint­ing itself.  In 2nd Story Job I use rota­tions of b, and the color of b to rep­re­sent three 2-state sys­tems to con­vey three mes­sages in the same string of characters. 

ASCII Binary rep­re­sen­ta­tion in Jake Beckman’s Binary Birds Paintings

In the image above I have taken the top line of code from ASCII Bird to show how, depend­ing on what you are look­ing at, the birds rep­re­sent “A”, “3” or “n”.  I also have pulled binary from the paint­ing, Avatar, to show the first let­ter in Avatar, “A”, is exactly the same rep­re­sen­ta­tion as the Sitting/Flying of “A” in ACSII Bird.  Finally I detail the third char­ac­ter from Avatar, “a” to show a lower case “a” has a dif­fer­ent 8-bit rep­re­sen­ta­tion than cap­i­tal “A”. 

So that is what is with all those zeros and ones in my paint­ings.  I hope this helps a lit­tle bit. 

Jake

Artist, AKAJake.com Come Expe­ri­ence the Art!

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