
Nathan Cornes / wage du
Digital artist trying to snatch poetry from the jaws of code. Born in Barcelona, based in São Paulo, Nathan Cornes aka @wagedu is a believer in nomadism and decentralization. As a generative artist, he sees a lot of poetry in numbers but has serious problems with excessive symmetry and perfection. To escape it, he bends math, injects chance and manipulates noise, cultivating imperfection and flaws.
aRo #85, June 2023
Generative Art (code with random elements).
aRo: “A Representation of.” Like a ladder or a hammer, art is often a tool. The less practical and most bizarre, basically the most overcomplicated self-made tool anyone could ever imagine. But it’s THE tool to explore ideas. I created this one to investigate, to poke and nudge at a few concepts that seem to go hand-in-hand.
Firstly, Representation, as in changing something to better explain it. Metaphors, symbols, codes —the very fabric of art, religion, and society. And secondly, the aesthetics of recursion or accumulation.
While many generative art projects pick buildings and landscapes as their subject, most artworks are made of particles arranged, connected and stretched to create bigger structures, to become textures or both.
But there’s a distinct texture that arises from mobs. And another, somewhat similar, that belongs to the accumulation and hoarding of not-same-objects or shapes.
I can’t tell if it’s a street grid, a collage, a group of shrines or actual cells, but to scratch all these potential meanings using accumulation, hoarding and mobs, is what brought the texture I was looking for.
What happens when a flower has more petals than pixels? Why do we know there’s more layers to that thumbnail?