 Interview with Jacquelyn
Martino
It was such an honor to once more be chosen to interview artist
extraordinaire, Jacquelyn Martino. I first introduced Jacquelyn to
the Renderosity community two years ago, when she presided as
Conference Chair at the 2008 SIGGRAPH Conference. At that time, her beautiful
digital art series, Form and Element, caught my interest,
as well as the interest of our readers. I was very excited to
discover that Jacquelyn will be giving a "talk" at the 2010
SIGGRAPH Conference Art Papers Sessions, and, more importantly,
that she could spare a few moments to sit down and discuss her
continued role as art-maker.
Dee Marie: For our readers who have never experienced a
SIGGRAPH Conference, can you please give a brief outline of what
the SIGGRAPH Conference Art Papers Sessions entails?
Jacquelyn Martino: Art Papers, while being
specific to art and design, fit within the overall conference
framework of excellence in new scholarly work. The papers are
peer-reviewed by SIGGRAPH and published in a special issue of
Leonardo, The Journal of the International Society of the Arts,
Sciences and Technology.
Accepted authors present their papers at the conference during
Art Papers Sessions: http://www.siggraph.org/s2010/for_attendees/artpapers/55
Dee Marie: How did you become involved in this year's
Art Papers Sessions?
Jacquelyn Martino: I started this work as part
of my Ph.D. at MIT. A member of my dissertation committee, Joe
Marks, really encouraged me to write a paper based on one of the
chapters.
Dee Marie: It must have been very exciting to be chosen
to present that specific paper.
Jacquelyn Martino: Having a peer-reviewed paper
on the work is certainly exciting, but I'm also looking forward to
the talk because artists don't always get the opportunity to engage
with a group as diverse as SIGGRAPH.
I'm preparing the talk now and I keep trying to anticipate the
questions that the audience might have. Thankfully, SIGGRAPH
audiences aren't shy, so I'm expecting to see my own work in new
ways based on the all the questions that I haven't anticipated!
Dee Marie: Your paper, The Immediacy of the Artist's
Mark in Shape Computation, will be presented on Tuesday, July
27, between 9 and 10:30am. What can attendees to your session
expect to learn from your paper?
Jacquelyn Martino: The Immediacy of the
Artist's Mark in Shape Computation fits within the contexts of
algorithm art and design computation. In my talk, I will describe
my work in the use of computation to produce artistic form.
The research for this paper included analyzing many years' worth
of my hand-drawn sketchbook entries and then working out rules, or
algorithms, to create forms similar in style to my hand-drawn work.
I think that sometimes people consider algorithmic art as distant
from the hand, but I believe many artists and designers are working
within some kind of rule-based framework.
Whether or not they choose to articulate the rules explicitly is
a separate issue. For myself, the explicit articulation in rules
has been instrumental in stylistic development and I can imagine
continuing to refine and expand an algorithmic understanding of my
drawing and painting for a long time to come.
Dee Marie: How excited were you to learn, when your
paper was accepted to the 2010 SIGGRAPH Conference Art Papers
Sessions, that Leonardo, The Journal of the International
Society of the Arts, Sciences and Technology would choose one
of your images [Sun], from your Form and Elements series,
to grace its back cover?
~ Moon * ~ * ~ *Thunder* ~ * ~ *Air * ~ * ~ * Fire * ~ * ~
* Earth * ~ * ~ * Sun ~
Form and Elements series
© Jacquelyn Martino
Jacquelyn Martino: I have a very high regard
for Leonardo, so Sun on the back cover is an
exciting personal accomplishment and a very meaningful way to be
recognized. Also, I think the selection underscores a larger
recognition that algorithmic art-making is an equal partner with
aesthetic criteria.
Form and Element: Sun © Jacquelyn
Martino
Dee Marie: What other artistic projects have you
immersed yourself in since 2008?
Jacquelyn Martino: I've been drawing, drawing,
drawing! One important personal lesson from my research in defining
algorithms for my hand-drawn work is that having a large body of
work to analyze is critical to my ability to "see" the rules.
Even in these times of great technology tools for artists,
working by hand with traditional tools provides the most immediacy
for me. Once I have an intuitive feeling for the rules, I still
need to generate many images before I can actually write rules that
reasonably approximate the hand-drawn style.
So, my current artistic projects are all geared to extending my
understanding of line and form to include hue and value. My plan is
to then use the new understanding to enrich my rule space and
evolve my current style. So, stay tuned for more artistic
computations.
Dee Marie: Tell us something personal about yourself
that the SIGGRAPH community would be surprised to
know.
Jacquelyn Martino: Despite my drive to write
rules for my art-marking, I cook without recipes.
Dee Marie: Wow … that is a shocker. What "culinary
invention" has recently piqued your imagination?
Jacquelyn Martino: Right now I'm trying to
recreate a Granita (Sicilian ice) that I tasted during my travels
to Sicily. It seems like it should be really simple, but getting
the right consistency is turning out to be much harder than I
expected!
Dee Marie: I look forward to revisiting you when you've
made your Granita breakthrough. So, besides artwork (and your
venture into unconventional cooking), what do you do for
fun?
Jacquelyn Martino: I feel that I'm
fundamentally a "maker" who is as much a research scientist as an
artist. Maybe the appropriate term is artist-researcher?
Regardless, I have a lot of fun trying to keep those aspects of
myself working in harmony to feed the desire to create. I view most
of what I do as a series of experiments with the occasional
inventive result along the way.
So, folded in with my studio practice, I'm reading a lot on
everything from color theory and paint formulation, to technical
literature on computational sketching, and trying to find time to
study more deeply the grand masters of drawing and painting and
human anatomy.
But I don't just read for work. Each summer after SIGGRAPH, I
take a long unplugged vacation in the Adirondacks and I just read
tons of library books. It has become a really nice tradition,
because I gather a long reading list from all my friends based on
the new titles I missed during the previous year.
I tell them that the only rule to get something on the list is
that it can't be technical, so I read a lot of fiction.
Dee Marie: That's a rather a nice way to cleanse your
technical art-making palette. I suppose we should get back to
business … as a long time SIGGRAPH Conference attendee and
committee member, what excites you the most about this year's
conference?
Jacquelyn Martino: SIGGRAPH is a wonderful
encounter with the artists and scientists who achieve amazing
aesthetics by redefining technological boundaries. Whole careers
and the innovations that they've produced can be traced from the
nearly four decades of conference documentation and experience.
Each year new people join the community to learn and begin their
journeys. The tradition of learning, teaching and growing that
"SIGGRAPHing" embodies is what excites me each year.
Dee Marie: I hate to end our time together, but I know
what a busy schedule you are keeping, especially this week. Thank
you so much for taking the time to let us play catch-up. One last
request … would you be so kind as to give our readers some
parting words of wisdom, in regards to pursuing their artistic
dreams?
Jacquelyn Martino: I think that particularly in
these days of higher tech tooling it's very easy to skip the "low
tech" aspect of honing your visual thinking skills.
Only recently have I read Ferguson's seminal 1977 Science paper,
The Mind's Eye: Nonverbal Thought in Technology. He brings
so many important messages together, but the lead quote is packed
with wisdom: "Thinking with pictures is an essential strand in
the intellectual history of technological development."
I also believe that having a dream is more than half the battle.
Once you have even just an inkling, or small feeling about what you
want to achieve artistically, you just have to keep feeding your
creative passions.
Thankfully, the food for passion is never that hard to find! You
can try a few things that I do to work on my ability to think in
pictures and stay motivated: practice and experiment; seek the
feedback and criticisms of others; study the work of those before
you; keep a sketchbook … and, come to SIGGRAPH!
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