‘In 1985, I said to myself that if I was an artist of my time, I should explore the technologies of my time.’ A year later, painter Samia Halaby (b. 1936, Jerusalem) acquired a Commodore Amiga 1000 computer, on which she began programming abstract kinetic paintings using the BASIC and C languages. ‘I wanted technology to reveal new formal attributes for the language of images’, she explains. The computer allowed Halaby to think of her images in movement and in relation to sound. Some of her kinetic paintings take inspiration from the urban environment, others are formal variations obtained by repeating and superimposing geometric motifs in a variety of colours. For Halaby, the computer is a means of continuing with the pictorial ideals of the avant-garde of the early twentieth century: ‘The most interesting one is the nature of the pictorial surface. In computing, the surface is luminous and has a memory. Furthermore, shape has the added attribute of sound and motion. Relativity of light and space in abstract painting is accompanied by the relativity of speed. Things appear, disappear, shift and move at different speeds. Also, growth and transformation become new attributes of shape. Shapes can also signal to each other or exude sounds together like a choir. Abstract moving images with sound are vastly different from film, which is moving image dominated by a lens. The lens is perspective and perspective negates the relativity of time and space by always freezing the image into specifics of time and place.’
Samia Halaby
Radical Software