The stylised representation of the image "Figure 10" by Brian Reffin Smith was modified with software written in simple BASIC language. The emotional meaning of the image makes the technical aspect irrelevant.

I found an old Russian medical textbook in a Berlin flea-market, dealing with the heart. Some images and diagrams seemed particularly vivid, and provided the stimulus for the present work. The outline of the figure (which is ambivalent in English, meaning "diagram" or "human form") and the stylised representation of the heart seemed cold when I first made them. But - is it a paradox? - when I began working on the ideas with the computer, a perceptual, representational change occurred, and now the image are ambivalent and warmer.

Sometimes you start with certain questions and you try to express them or solve them using art. In this case, however, it was more like a cycle of changes between the picture as problem and solution.

Technical Background

This was also reflected technically in theproduction of the image (which exists as a colour slide taken from the screen,but can also exist as a large, coloured canvas, originating from the colourslide).

The image first appeared when I "painted" it electronically, using a joystick directly into the memory of a BBC Model B micro-computer. The image was then treated in a number of ways using "home-made" software written in the BASIC language. To avoid some of the harshness of the original image, it was passed out from the computer, via a video connection, and then back into the graphic memory, now as a more degraded image, but able to be perceive ddifferently.

Finally, to make the colour slide, a very bad quality video monitor was used.