Robert Hodgin

Some really crazy videos coming from this San Francisco boy, Robert Hodgin. It all started with a newly found passion for an open source processing program and from there, he went on into his solitary voyage amidst a world of music, art, graphics, design and technology. The procedure is not very clear, but I'll do my best to describe it. Basically, he takes a piece of music, he chops it up and packs together the significant pieces. Form these pieces he then extracts series of numbers and logical sequences. He takes instances of chords, rhythms, tempo, and he applies it on various spherical surfaces. He unpacks the music piece onto the volume; Mozart or Radiohead are spread across a surface of a ball.

Later variables are applied to each of those instances; density, color, liquid, solid, gas, velocity, impact, friction. Each variable is then assigned to each instance taken from the sound. Then he unravels it all, renders, edits, zooms, retouches, studies and breaks it up. Add to all that some resources from the material world; implosions, fish colonies, algae, hair, a lot of hair, fire and other various alchemical elements and you get imagery that is fusion of virtual and human. Add to that an extraordinary aesthetic sense, brilliant graphic skill, wise use of signs, and artistic experience, and you almost get a masterpiece.
It's not art, it's not graphics, it's not technology, it's nothing. It's a piece of the world that is inside Robert's head.

If the institutional art and design world were capable of tracking down these expressive talents, these visual games, these revelatory visions, perhaps it would crack open a whole new world.