As a primarily visual digital artist, my medium is the pixel grid — a numeric, encoded, highly organized system that takes instruction, responds to error and interference, and is a surface for gestural expression and inscription. I explore this pixel space through a variety of often simultaneous compositional practices: cinema, visual and sound collage, writing and programming. I want surfaces to provoke and startle in their abstraction and yet seem familiar as source material from our current moment of media saturation.
I am drawn to work that pluralizes narrative sequence through combinatory processes. If an idea or story can be generated from a single semiotic sequence, what might be generated with multiple, nested and/or linked sequences in an interface or network? How does a non-linear juxtaposition of micro-narratives alter our sense of time and space? How can our digital tools teach us to see beyond narrative and causality towards a more embedded and fractal sense of being?
This open-ended questioning of the digital puts me into an intuitive and improvisational composition process that plays with the edges of figuration and abstraction, narrative and indeterminacy, intention and chance. Most of my material is captured and remixed from daily life, but it is in post-production (editing, mark-up, programming, collaging) that I try to push beyond familiar representational forms to open up a temporal and spatial sense that is multiple and generative. My work comes out of a dialogue between my intentions and the computer’s ability to disrupt, extend and complicate those intentions.
Will Luers is a digital artist, writer, and educator specializing in recombinant, computational, and AI cinema art. His work and collaborations have garnered international recognition and been featured in festivals and conferences such as the Electronic Literature Organization, FILE(Brazil), and ISEA. "novelling," a generative work made in collaboration with poet Hazel Smith and sound artist Roger Dean, won the 2018 Robert Coover Award for Electronic Literature.
Luers holds an MFA in Film from Columbia University and has taught cinema history, theory and practice for over 20 years. He has maintained a particular research interest in web-based video and has published numerous essays about evolving forms of digital cinema. He was awarded Best Screenplay at the 2005 Nantucket Film Festival, and in 2010, a fellowship at the Vectors-NEH Summer Institute for the development of his database video documentary, "The Father Divine Project."
Luers teaches web development, digital cinema and multimodal publishing in the Creative Media & Digital Culture program at Washington State University Vancouver. He is the founder of the international online journal, The Digital Review, and will edit its 2024 issue on AI creativity. Luers is also the current Managing Editor at the electronic book review.
w l u e r s @ g m a i l . com
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