Paulhigham@spacesampler.com
www.Virtualsculpture.org
www.vrmusic.net
Born Scotland 1954. Studied Fine Art at Liverpool & Goldsmiths School of Art, London. Currently Based in New York.
A progenitor of Virtual Sculpture and Data Sculpture, Higham is exploring discrete commonalities in self organization, emergence & catastrophe found in artificial and natural structures. Carl Plackman once described his work as „Schematic Entropy Machines“ referring to a series of vacuum formed plastic prototypes from 1974 that Higham had made in response to the work of John Von Neumann.
I harvest grains of data from digital streams mined from population in real time, revealing organicity, hysteresis & turbulence within culture showing the flux of societal transformations such as the freeze and crash of the dollar; these Data driven works deal with the commodification of information and dynamics of data itself.
As form follows function.
When I retrieve real world data from sources such as the Statue of Liberty, texts of Malthus, Dow Jones, Gold Futures, as well as weather & satellite streams I synthesize them with coding & genetic algorithms, perturb them with virus & noise in order to generate automata in series thus creating new vectoral forms, a process I call ‚Autotecture‘. Works are output in cnc/rapid prototype/projection/maps, data sculpture & data sonification or left in their real time evolving virtual state. Recently presented at the Palais De La‘Couverte in Paris, upcoming research artist-inresidence at the Museum of Steel Sculpture, Ironbridge, UK.
