TI-92: Golden Nica / u19

The Golden Nica of the Prix Ars Electronica category u19 goes to a work that fully lives up to the subtitle of this category: 'Freestyle Computing': Karola Hummer (19) makes drawings on a standard school pocket calculator using means which were not actually conceived for doing so.

TI-92
Karola Hummer

I draw using mathematical functions from analytical geometry. I never use the cursor, but instead calculate each line, enter the function in the Y-Editor of my TI-92 calculator and then let it be graphed on the screen.

I first hit upon the idea at the end of my sixth year of college preparatory school, when I took my TI-92 and decided to draw my math teacher. Although it still took weeks of experimenting around with the graphic program before my “Homo mathematicus” emerged. I think the very coarseness of the pictures gives them their special appeal and the limited number of pixels poses a particular challenge to me. In my first pictures, I quite deliberately restricted myself to using just one y-editor and one screen. In this way I had to make do without improvements I would have liked to have made on my pictures. In any case, I had to be “sparing” with functions and choose the most suitable mathematical function for depicting a specific curve. I mainly used parts of straight lines, circles, ellipses, parabolas and trigonometric functions. For the double portrait of my parents, I superimposed three screens (approx. 260 functions) for the first time. In *Rio* I carried this method to extremes and the limits of my TI-92’s memory capacity: about 980 functions superimposed on ten screens. For me, with these pictures, it was less a matter of racking my brains mathematically than it was a question of experimenting with the graphics.

It goes without saying that I don’t consider myself an artist, on the contrary, in contemporary terms, I see myself as an “anti-artist”: I don’t aim at provoking or shocking and have taken a route diametrically opposed to modern art, for I don’t seek abstraction. The abstraction which occurs is preconditioned by the technology I use (a screen with about 23000 dots), and I strive for maximum reality with my modest means. If art links ideas and technology, then my pictures are, at least, modest artistic expression.





1 comment(s)
Re: TI-92: Golden Nica / u19 (Poti / 2002/8/22 11:03:58)