August 11, 2010 | In Art, Technology, Think, Video | No Comments

Kim Asendorf’s pixel sorting Mountain Tour

Kim Asendorf is an artist working out of Bremen, Germany. He’s trained as an industrial electrician but has since taken up studying Media & Social Hacking, Net.art & New Media Art and Creative Coding. His blog is full of code test that put on display his curious mind as he experiments with various code libraries and softwares. Typically code tests as art are hard to digest visually but this recent set of mountain landscapes that he’s pixel sorted are contrary to the norm. They retain enough of the original image giving our minds something to grasp onto yet manipulate it in way that let’s us wander among the newly created color fields. I find it quite interesting that photos today can be run through a code sequence and yield images that resemble art that was created 50 years ago. Looking at the sharp juxtaposition of colors, almost torn away from the original image below it, I’m reminded of the AbEx paintings of Clyfford Still. His work didn’t have the depth that these coded mountains do (at least on screen, in person is a different topic entirely) but the idea of manipulating reality to challenge the viewer is shared by both. It makes me wonder what kind of mental process Still was going through that led him to paint color fields that could, half a decade later, be created with a few lines of code and a handful of pixels.

Kim has amassed quite the library of images up on his Flickr page too. If you like the Mountain Tour I’d recommend checking out the results of some of his other coding experiments. His pixel sorted aerials are equally stunning.

Update: As of late, Kim has moved into experimenting with motion. This video for a.d.l.r. applies his pixel sorting technique to the film of a space shuttle launch and the results provide you with an entirely new way of seeing a launch.