JACKSON POLLOCK PAINTING GENERATOR V1.0

BACKGROUND: Jackson Pollock was the commanding figure of the abstract expressionist movement. By the mid 1940s he was painting in a completely abstract manner, and the `drip and splash' style for which he is best known emerged in 1947. The design of his painting had no relation to the shape or size of the canvas. This manner of Action painting had in common with Surrealist theories of automatism that it was supposed by artists and critics to result in a direct expression or revelation of the unconscious moods of the artist. Source: Web Museum, Paris METHOD: For this Final Flash/ActionScript project, I have created a simple online device that will randomly generate images reminiscent of Pollock's work. I have accomplished this by researching and analyzing Pollock's work, finding the most common elements in his paintings, and creating symbols for each "recognized" element in Flash, which served as a basis for the random compositions the device creates. . INTENT: The project aims to explore the meaning and function of "automatism" and seek to encourage the following questions: Is the term "automatism" still relevant if applied to computers rather than the human mind? Is there relationship between the human subconscious and the computer generated artwork or does the artwork lose its sense of humanity completely? If the term "random", which we tend to associate with the "human experience", is simply a mathematical property, what is the building block of being human? Is our subconcious simply a mathematical formula that repeats itself based on the variables it receives from the outer world? .