Out of one's place
Introduction and conceptual framing. Why this studio asks you to stand somewhere else, speak from an authored identity, and build the rules through which that position makes work.
- Studio
- Computationally Yours
- Theme
- Out of One's Place
- Length
- Twenty working days
- Ends in
- An Atlas of Elsewhere
- Read
- Before Day 1
The premise
You are about to graduate into a world being reshaped by water, heat, automation, migration, the city and the work people do in it. It's hard to see a condition clearly from inside it.
This studio uses displacement as a method. For a month you step out of your own coordinates of place, time, language or role, and speak from another position: one tied to a real condition, close enough to matter and far enough to see. You don't leave the world; you stand somewhere else in it and look back.
Authored identities
Artists and writers have long worked through authored selves, not to hide but to hold a position more fully than their own name allowed.
Fernando Pessoa
Wrote as several heteronyms, among them Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis and Álvaro de Campos, each with a biography, a philosophy and a style of their own.
Rrose Sélavy
Marcel Duchamp's alter ego signed works, appeared in photographs by Man Ray, and gave him another way to make and sign work.
Guerrilla Girls
Anonymous artists who work under the names of dead women artists, so the argument about exclusion, not the person, stays in front.
- An authored identity is a position. It has a name, an origin, a condition it answers to, beliefs it would defend and rules its work obeys.
- It is not a costume or a character. No mascots, jokes or escapes. If it couldn't speak to people living inside its condition, it isn't ready.
- It is not you under another name. The distance between you and it is where the learning happens, and you'll write that distance down.
Rules as authorship
In generative art the artist writes the rules, and the rules make the work. Sol LeWitt put it plainly: "The idea becomes a machine that makes the art."
The first computer artists in the 1960s drew with pen plotters, the same kind of machine you'll use in Week 3. Their work is your direct lineage.
| Who | What to look at |
|---|---|
| Kolam | The South Indian threshold drawings made around a grid of dots by fixed rules: generative pattern long before computers. |
| Jean Arp | Collages arranged "according to the laws of chance" (c. 1916–17): chance as a method. |
| A. Michael Noll | Computer Composition with Lines (1964), a program's answer to Mondrian, whose grid this handbook borrows. |
| Georg Nees | Schotter (1968): order breaking down, square by square. |
| Frieder Nake | Plotter drawings from the mid-1960s, and his writing on algorithmic art. |
| Vera Molnár | Decades of systematic variation on simple geometric rules, by hand and by machine. |
| Manfred Mohr | The cube and the hypercube, explored as a complete system. |
| Sol LeWitt | Wall drawings made by others from his written instructions. |
| Harold Cohen | AARON, a drawing program he developed for decades: authorship shared with a machine. |
| Lillian Schwartz | Computer films and images made at Bell Labs from the late 1960s. |
| Casey Reas and Ben Fry | Processing (2001), the tool that opened creative coding to artists; p5.js followed for the browser. |
New to how computers draw? Read Foundations: pixels and vectors, CPU and GPU, rendering, files. Your system is where your identity's position becomes something a machine can carry out. A rule without a reason in that position is decoration.
Codex and authorship
You'll write code with Codex, an AI coding agent. It can make you fast. It can also make your work sound like everyone else's.
- Codex proposes; you decide. The reasons for every rule come from the identity, not from the machine.
- You can explain every line. At each critique you explain your system's logic in your own words.
- Image generation is not a generative system. Prompting an image model, on its own, doesn't count here.
- The words are yours. Codex doesn't write your manifesto, your statement or your log.
How to work this way is set out in Codex onboarding and prompt library.
Material
The screen is not the end of the work. Every student makes at least one exhibition-quality physical artefact.
A2 pen plot
The system draws with ink on paper, stroke by stroke.
Resin object
The system becomes a small, precise thing you can hold.
Archival print
The system's output in tone and colour, on paper made to last.
One medium is enough; you can work in two or all three. Choose the material whose behaviour carries the identity's position, not the one that's easiest.
An Atlas of Elsewhere
The month ends in an exhibition: twenty identities, each in its own zone, read together as one atlas of positions on the world you're about to enter.
Each zone holds the identity card, the manifesto, the artefact and a QR code to the repository, so a visitor can follow the work from position to rules to object. The Collective Atlas connects all twenty. See Exhibition planning and installation.
Speaking with care
An authored identity often speaks from a condition other people live with every day. That is a responsibility.
- Research before you speak. Use real sources, archives and data, and cite them.
- Don't borrow a community's identity as a costume. If your identity speaks from a community you're not part of, ask honestly whether you should, and talk it through with the facilitator.
- Ask before you use people. Anyone you photograph, record or quote needs to know how their words or image will be shown.
- Respect the data. Personal data stays out of the repository and the exhibition.
What the month asks
- Week 1 · Identity: take a position.
Author one identity tied to a real condition, and write its manifesto.
- Week 2 · Computation: write the rules.
Build a system that speaks in that voice, and make twenty outputs.
- Week 3 · Materialisation: give it a body.
Test materials, prototype, and lock a production file.
- Week 4 · Exhibition: stand behind it.
Produce, document, install and open the show.
The month is assessed in three submissions: A1 (identity, 20%) on Day 5, A2 (system, 30%) on Day 10 and A3 (the final, 50%) on Day 20. Day by day in the schedule; what's due each week in the weekly briefs. Every day ends with an entry in the daily log.