The following interview was done in Telegram chat, the monospaced––non-blockquoted lines are from me, and the blockquoted lines are from XALTED.
so, evening XALTED!
should I always use all caps when writing your name?
loh english wkwkwk
uhhh yeah I guess hahaha
ok I’ll refrain from mentioning your name then lol
lol you don't need to for this purpose 😂
but what is XALTED really mean? Is a cheesy question, I know, is it from salted egg?
Ahahah it's from the word 'exalted' actually. I used to play Path of Exile and there's this item called 'Exalted Orb' and I kinda like the name and design
So I shortened it to XALTED to make it sound somewhat more esoteric lol
Oooo we got a gamer over here 👀
🤣 nahhh I'm not that much of a gamer, just casual gamer at best hahaha.
You do your artwork with code right? So is your coding proficiency came from your interest in gaming?
Not really, but I guess I'm always interested in new media in art. My first encounter with coding in general was only a few years ago; I was broke and jobless like many other art graduates lol. Then my friend teached me basic web dev, just simple stuff with HTML and CSS and it kinda goes from there
The funny thing is I never really moved from that basic knowledge of HTML and CSS for the next few year since my front-end projects rarely needs more complicated system haha. Javascript is something that I only learned pretty recently, until I found Cables with its node-based system and I abandoned hand-typing code for a while. Nowadays I try to re-learn JS properly from scratch haha
your broke-ness and jobless really paid it off now
I'm curious at how people draw with code, could you screenshot some behind the scenes of how you do it?
This one is the patch from "Here & Now" -- pardon the tangled cables, I'm not very organized haha. To create this I started by randomly scattering rectangles as grass and low-poly sphere as rocks. They were laid flat at first, then I displace their position with Perlin noise to create wavy peaks and valleys.
With my landscape works (Fever Dream Forest, Here & Now, and A Less Traveled Path) I already had a vision of what they will look like beforehand, probably because they were more figurative/representative. My creative processes aren't always like this though, I usually started with some basic texture and shape nodes in Cables, then adding more operator little by little, playing with the parameters to see what they look like. After I get something that I like, I recreate it in a new patch and fine-tuning it to create the finished work. Even before I knew creative coding (or noding), I rarely draw a sketch for my work. I guess I'm a materially-oriented artist haha. I always prefer to work directly with the material to get an understanding of its properties, limitation, and perhaps what it 'wants' to be. Then I try to work with it instead of against it or bending it to my will, kind of like I'm collaborating with the medium whether it's physical or digital.
damn even in node it looks confusing for me, can't imagine looking at p5'
*“I always prefer to work directly with the material to get an understanding of its properties, limitation, and perhaps what it 'wants' to be”*this is sublime, more so in digital realm. I mean you can't really "touch" it right?
props to people that can work with a medium that they can't even touch physically
Haha yeah but you can still interact with it. I found the limitations in softwares appealing, similar with the limitations of physical material. Cables is pretty powerful but it also has some limit as to what it can do; it's a higher 'language' compared to p5, so to speak. I also like to tinker with obsolete drawing apps on my 1st gen iPad from time to time, their limitation make it so fun to play with!
so you came from art school but not touching new media until graduated, what are your major back then exactly?
I studied Fine Arts in art school, focusing on ceramic art. Working with ceramics and clay influenced my perspective on material as a whole and how I treat it in my works. Ceramic has a long history of being viewed as 'domestic' material and is lower in hierarchy compared to painting and sculpture. Even within the ceramic discipline there's a hierarchy of clay (earthenware is considered the lowest, with porcelain at the highest tier) and my final graduation project reflects on that aspect. Each type of clay also have their own properties, and it's up to the artist to work with it or against it. This study of materiality of clay has formed my way of approaching any medium, including digital.
your practice is like stretching from one of the most ancient to one of the most recent, damn
Oooh you're right! I never thought about it that way haha, that sounds really neat
so do you think your work will be different, in a sense, that you trying p5 now?
I'm still at my early stage of exploring p5, but yeah I guess it will be different since Cables and p5 works differrently. I have so much to learn and keep up!
for sure, the road is still wide open upon you
I look at your past works, it went from quite an abstract form to suddenly figurative (of landscapes), and 3 collection at that. Why? Do you have special attachment to the theme?
Maybe not the landscape itself per se, but I guess I always have this fondness of magical realism. At the time I was looking at a lot of paintings, looking for inspiration. Particularly at Peter Doig's work, since he's also my wife's favourite painter. I really adore his way of blending and layering the paint, how he blend shapes to create a magical-looking landscape with no discernible distinction between objects. Everything blends together, sort of like a fuzzy memory. I also listened to Swans a lot, and one song that struck me was the one titled "Where Does a Body End?". It captured my feeling precisely, of blurred and hazy sense of our own state of being. And that's how "Fever Dream Fairy Fantasy Forest" was created.
The two following landscape works, "Here & Now" and "A Less Traveled Path" is sort of a continuation of that exploration phase. I try to not getting occupied with concept or narrative, to just purely express myself and also pursue the technical aspect of creating with nodes. It's weird in a way, when I let myself go the resulting visual is a lot more representative haha.
damn now I see Peter Doig in all of your work
I think that's the reason I always come back to Fever Dream Fantasy Forest among all of your work, the feeling of displaced reality gives a new perspective each time I look back
Haha yeah I think it's still my favorite work so far 🤣 I tried so many times creating something similar but always failed miserably
you will make better things going forward man, 100% positive
I think that's all for now, really really happy and thankful you could join my storefront genesis with my other favorite artists 🙏🏼
Thank you so much for having me, mate!
udah nih? wkwk
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The interview was conducted in order to welcome XALTED’s new work in Nifty Gateway under spirouzi’s publication: spir’s shrine, titled There & Then
