About Me
My name is Brenton and I am experimental digital artist interested in new media & generative graphics. I am based in Baltimore, Maryland. I've always been inspired by unconventional ways digital media can be used to create art, like image editor apps on mobile phones, old surveillance cameras, and seeing how these things can be manipulated with contemporary software.
My visual language takes a lot from glitch art, using hyper saturated colors and distortion. Think of breaking a screen and pressing hard on it to see how it breaks and bends. I also enjoy the early Windows Media Player visualizers that could visualize an .mp3 file. Specifically, in my youth, enamored by WinAMP, Milkdrop, and demoscene. These technologies help inform my practice today as I create immersive visual art with an intent to understand the mechanisms/programming/code of it all.
You can view my works here: https://linktr.ee/brent0n
Inspirations/ points of reference
New Media takes a big chunk out of a lot of disciplines and time periods. I am mainly focused on when technology became accessible to artists and how capitalism has proliferated consumer electronics to all people. One of the biggest artists to do this was Paik Nam-June.
Visually and philosophically, I really love Paik's work. He did pioneer video art, after all. Following this, I have a strong connection to glitch art and its accidental nature. It feels like breaking something intentionally over and over again to get a result that cannot be replicated. Glitches are unintentional and produce beautiful digital moments like when a screen is burned from displaying content too long, an angry outburst creates a moment frozen by the screen, and when your illegal soccer stream gets interrupted. Example of this being harnessed in a music video and reproduced is in A$AP Rocky's Yamborghini High. This visual anomaly/effect/artifact is called datamoshing.
These are some of the visual references I normally point to or have been able to easily describe when talking about my work and inspirations, which could open a whole new, 100 page dissertation about. I'll add some links to things I reference or struggled to find the name of.
Theoretical -> Visual
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_artifact
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypnic_jerk
- https://www.thefreedictionary.com/Paradolia
- ASCII art - Wikipedia
Visual -> Practice
- Virtual Nature: A Computer Generated Visual Odyssey From the Makers of the Mind's Eye : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
- Good Morning, Mr. Orwell - Wikipedia
- Bad Karaoke Videos, Explained - Thrillist
- Video: The New Wave : WGBH : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XXyjNOMWhY
- https://www.instagram.com/rdklinc
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