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 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. I want surfaces to provoke and startle in their abstraction and yet seem familiar as source material from our current moment of media saturation.
Will Luers is digital media artist and writer living in Portland,Oregon. In the Creative Media & Digital Culture program at Washington State University Vancouver, he teaches multimedia authoring, creative programming, digital storytelling and digital cinema. His art has been exhibited internationally and selected for various festivals and conferences, including the Electronic Literature Organization, FILE(Brazil) and ISEA. The generative e-lit work novelling, a collaboration with Hazel Smith and Roger Dean, won the 2018 Robert Coover Award for Electronic Literature.
w l u e r s @ g m a i l . com
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