Learning the process of wetplate photography opens up the door to the magic of light. I worked with Sari and Jason Madsen at Tintypebooth doing tintype portraits at street fairs. This process, which wasย commonly used at the end of the 19th century, remains both surprisingly simple and wondrous at the same time. I never got over the excitement of seeing the cloudy swirl of the chemicals float off the plate to magically reveal the traces of captured light.
The label of “digital art” is often applied to work that use computers to simulate the look of traditional physical media even when the physical medium on which this visual grammar was evolved is no longer there. Ultimately, algorithms are to data what the paintbrush is to the canvas, and in both cases it is the job of the artist to apply the former to the latter in a way that reveals a universal truth. These images were generated using the Processing toolkit.
