ADRIEN LUCCASOFTWARE AND HARDWARE AUG. 2nd 2015

Between 1998-1999 and 2003 I composed hours of music with a computer, a plastic microphone and a Hi-Fi.

As primary material, I was recording the sound of objects like glasses or met-al bowls, violin strings, the sound of my brother playing guitar, or my own voice while I was singing music I adored like Radiohead, Smashing Pumpkins and other things that I don’t remember anymore - with headphones on my ears. Other sounds were drawn piece by piece in Sonic Foundry Sound Forge 4, a sound editor downloaded on “appz” or peer-to-peer platforms.

In Magix Music Maker 2: a 4-tracks edi-tor that I got in a CD-ROM that came for free with PC-FUN in 1998 – mostly a video game magazine - I was superimposing these sounds. I was really frustrated not to find a crack for the version 3 of Music Maker, where there were 16 tracks… I liked this software a lot because there was no grid: sounds could easily be placed anywhere on the timeline like on an empty page. It was a rough duo of softwares but with it I was feeling very close to the sounds, and in total control of what I was doing.

During that period, some structural prin-ciples still active in my actual work were born: a rule of constant variation (like in Frank Zappa’s piece Inca Roads), searching for the coexistence of sever-al spatial scales (a bit like in granular synthesis), a hate of symmetry, a hate of repetitions, a hate of constant beats, of grids, and a rejection of classical tonal scales.

I was building “out of tune scales” (“gammes de fausses notes” in French) us-ing equal but arbitrary intervals between pitches. Such scales had an equal temper-ament but were not based on EDO (Equal Division of the Octave) or TET princi-ples (Twelve Equal Temperament). They were “irregular” in the sense that they didn’t divide octaves regularly.

If you multiply the speed of a basic sound A by a value i – with: i = 2 - you’ll get an octave up: if the sound A is a C#, you’ll get a C# again, one octave higher. Let’s replace i by j = 1.189207, we will get a new sound B that is 1/4th of an oc-tave higher (see Fig. 1)

If you re-multiply B’s speed by j you’ll get C – multiplying C by j again will give you D and so on… In this particular case the sound E will be one octave up of A and the sound I one octave up of E.

k 2 1,189207 1,0594 1,2 Hz Hz Hz Hz A 20 200,0 200,0 200,0 B 40 237,8 211,9 240,0 C 80 282,8 224,5 288,0 D 160 336,4 237,8 345,6 E 320 400,0 252,0 414,7 F 640 475,7 267,0 497,7 G 1280 565,7 282,8 597,2 H 2560 672,7 299,7 716,6 I 5120 800,0 317,5 860,0 J 10240 951,4 336,4 1032,0 K 20480 1131,4 356,4 1238,3 L … 1345,4 377,5 1486,0 M … 1600,0 400,0 1783,2 N … 1902,7 423,8 2139,9 O … 2262,7 449,0 2567,8 P … 2690,9 475,7 3081,4 Q … 3200,0 504,0 3697,7 R … 3805,5 533,9 4437,2 S … 4525,5 565,7 5324,7 T … 5381,7 599,3 6389,6 U … 6400,0 635,0 7667,5 V … 7610,9 672,7 9201,0 W … 9051,0 712,7 11041,2 X … 10763,5 755,1 13249,5 Y … 12800,0 800,0 15899,4 Z … 15221,9 847,6 19079,2

Fig. 1 – 4 different frequency scales. Octaves are highlighted in italic characters. The 4th scale (on the right) has no frequency values separated by one or several octave(s).

If instead of j = 1.189207 you use a value such as k = 1.2, you will keep the equal temperament (each pitch is still separat-ed by the same value) but not the regular division of the octave. This will give you the feeling that every single note is dif-ferent: no note is repeated in the scale. In the entire range of sounds - from the infrasound to the ultrasound -, you will have for example only one C#, and no ele-ments of the set will be separated by one or more octaves, but only by an integer amount of equal values that cannot divide an octave without rest.

As any good “fundamentalist”, I was making my own sounds, my own scales, my own melo-dies and my own rhythms that were breaking themselves after a few cycles.

Fig. 2 - LP 2003 prototype, software view on musical geometry, 2011 Link: https://vimeo.com/30382829

Fig. 3 – Vrille #2, 2007-2008 – inks and pencil on paper

I was combining these fragments at differ-ent speeds to create sound compositions that didn’t have a fixed play speed (some LPs sound good played at 45 or 78 rota-tions/min, don’t they?). Superimpositions of these compositions were eventually cre-ating more complex pieces of music.

Seen in the software, the files could be very beautiful: there was a clear rela-tion between the sound of it and the vi-sual appearance of the tracks that were displaying how it was made. I really liked that. It became a kind of rule for me: an artwork should be as transparent as possi-ble about the history of its construction, the organization of its structure and the nature of its constitutive “ingredients” (see Fig. 2)

In 2003 it was still expensive for an art student to archive hours of uncompressed 44100 Hz 16 bit stereo .wav files. The ac-cumulation of such files on my computer and the enormous time spent in front of the machine fighting against the mess - plus the fact that I got other troubles in my personal life at that moment - decided me to stop everything: I archived all the messy files and folders on CDs, I sold the computer to a good friend and I did some-thing else.

I remember convincing myself that the com-puter was like a vacuum cleaner for all my time, my memory, and my energy. Howev-er, while I was making my music I somehow felt deeply connected to the past, the present and the future. Working with re-corded sound obviously connects you with time, as does any form of digital art: the many generations of machines and soft-ware that are valid in a short time-window automatically “historicize” anything that you do. It kind of always feels like the things you do are very “actual”. In that sense I was maybe not just a geeky-teenag-er-amateur-composer, but a bit of a 90’s – 2000’s contemporary artist, as naïve as it may sound given my age at that moment.

It took some time to accomplish my next project: find a convenient media to make visual forms with a similar logic. Around 2007-2008, geometric drawings with pencil, inks and later pigments on paper became my privileged support for research-ing about forms, scales, light and color.

It immediately became a problem that I couldn’t control the color parameters (hue, lightness, saturation) as easily and precisely as I was tuning sounds be-fore. It was probably also easier to see

the flaws and the lack of rigor on paper. I became harsher with myself: I wanted to become as precise by hand on paper as a Hi-Fi system for the sound.

I didn’t trust at all digital color! – on screen or with printers – as the hardware seemed unreliable: for example the same RGB color code would give very differ-ent results depending on the screen, the printer, the media, etc. I knew that there were basically two ways of synthesizing colors (often called “additive” and “sub-tractive”), but I didn’t really have much experience of it. I didn’t succeed to get a good colorless grey by juxtaposing col-ored dots in a “pointillist” way for exam-ple (see Fig. 3)

From 2009 to 2014 I produced almost only “color studies” with pigments on paper. I wanted to get rid of my ignorance in the field of color-mixings. I never had a chance to study this before during my aca-demic studies in Belgium and in France. I remembered and learned the necessary mathematics and optics, studied the his-tory of color-systems and part of today’s color-science and laboratory color-manage-ment techniques. I collected most of the best pigments available (painter’s color hardware), I learned how to use Micro-soft Excel as a better calculator and data organizer. Later I switched to real code written in C++ and in the Python program-ming language (the software).

I always developed both the hardware and the software in parallel (this is still true today): making my own special matte paints with pigments and fish glue for pre-cision drawing on paper, customizing pre-cision drawing instruments with ceramic coatings, printing instructions on paper to be used as drawing guidelines, develop-ing methods to calibrate tools, measuring the colors with a spectrophotometer, mak-ing mathematical models and equations of the structures I was drawing in order to obtain super precise color-mixings, nota-bly perfect neutral greys with averages of little parallel lines made of very bright colors, etc.

Everything was calibrated, measured, and quantified. I developed a personal cult for the highest chromatic quality and for high-precision. I was something in-be-tween a digital artist, a programmer and an artisan. I didn’t like it very much but a good friend of mine called me an “al-chemist”. I wanted to reinvent in my own terms the problems of light and color in visual art, by myself, from first hand, at

home. I wanted to prove that my near-re-ligious belief in the superiority of com-plexity over minimalism is more than a belief, and to show what the intake of scientific analysis within an experimen-tal practice of painting can produce, and I wanted to do this like a craftsman, by hand, with the most beautiful and expen-sive colored materials available.

Everything was made from scratch. I found my lab instruments on Ebay in 2011: first an old Minolta CR-221 color-meter from 1984, then an X-Rite MA68II multi-angle spectrophotometer that came from an Opel (the cars) lab in Germany - I love talking about my machines, my pigments and my in-struments too...

Little by little, at every step of my studies, I was writing fragments of the software that was needed to accomplish what I was doing: something that would combine colorimetry and geometry to make visual objects. Around that moment I dis-cussed, worked and became friend with a few computer programmers/scientists (Mar-cell Mars, Robert Ochshorn, Joshua Horow-itz, Jean-Guillaume Louis).

I finally started to code my own algorithms in 2013-2014, and in June 2014 I bought my first large-format pigment inkjet (“gi-clée”) printer, an Epson 9800. One month ago I replaced it with the latest model: the 9900. That’s how in 2015 I became an algorithmic artist working with an inkjet printer. What’s funny is that it makes me feel very close to the music years:

-> I start by collecting some primary ma-terial: a media, a printer, a color pal-ette (before it was a palette of sounds)-> Then a software accomplishes all the necessary operations on colors and forms to give a shape to my ideas-> Finally the Epson 9900 plays the role that the Hi-Fi sound system played before

The difference is that this time I had to develop the software by myself.

It was strange for me to work almost 100% on the computer again - I resisted for years against this. At the time of the color studies I put a bunch of things aside, that was necessary to build prob-lems, tools and methods. Today I feel like I earned a lot of freedom: my works are getting closer to be (almost figurative-) pictures, and the obvious scientific aspect of the work took a step back even if it is still present. I like that too.

Composing, testing or prototyping ideas with a computer and a printer can be done very quickly - I like that too :)

Soon, I’d like to make my own hardware as well, i.e. a better printing media, my own inks, and a 16-channel inkjet printer.

Itteville (France) 2:33 AM

Maquette v.0.2.8.1 – high density beta8247488 pixels, 1314 colors, 3094 lightsUnique 10-channel pigment inkjet print on Lyve archival inkjet canvas456 x 218 cmJuly 17, 2015