About/Bio
Dr. Woohoo! bio
ART + SCIENCE = SERIOUS FUN
Dr. Woohoo is a New Mexico based artist who is programming a path from code back to the natural world. To create his art he combines the intelligence of algorithms, the creative expressiveness of organic media with behaviors found in natural systems.
Transforming ideas-to-pixels-to-atoms, Woohoo sculpts the strings of code from an abstract artistic vision into color, painting and sculpting applications to generate his contemporary and sophisticated artwork into prints, videos, installations, glass, ceramic and metal sculptures.
Woohoo’s art plays with the extremes of formlessness and structure. The formless compositions resemble Dale Chihuly’s fanciful blown glass chandeliers. These luminous sculptures use color and light that play out in whimsical tendrils looking for serious fun. Other paintings use bold and bright color contrasts to ground his airborne patterns, which seem to defy their static state and float off the canvas.
Equally ornate but highly structured is a series of geometric circles. They have a glass-like component as well, but are flat, like stained glass. The effect ranges from subdued, dense, and composed to the ‘60s pop culture color explosions reminiscent Peter Max.
As a generative artist, Woohoo is part of an influential set of modern day alchemists using programming and natural media. His approach is commonly found in artificial intelligence but Woohoo considers it “serious fun.” As he describes, “The magic of the creative process expresses itself when the analytic side of my mind crashes into the creative.”
But to get to the fun (making art), Woohoo has made some serious contributions in developing tools for artists, aka, Woohoo’s Painting Machines. Brushes.paints.stencils.(BPS) is an application he developed that emulates natural media, records the paint sessions, attaches interesting and unusual behaviors to the paint drops and either plays them back in real-time or renders them out for broadcast tv, film or print. In The Mod: Color Analytics (ITM), creates custom color palettes from any image.
The incentive behind his colorists’ science is to bring the digital medium closer to an organic process. Woohoo describes his process:
“The only way to allow my artistic vision to take form was to create applications that could: intelligently analyze colors; influence brush strokes by music and other data streams; control the behaviors and the form of the paint – influencing the paint from natural dynamics like gravity and wind and shape-shifting the form into unexpected shapes like glass; and then paint it onto the surface or texture map of the digital 3d models. For the final transition from pixels-to-atoms, the form needed to embrace properties that allowed me to print it in a 2d plane on canvas or laser-cut/etched on acrylic, as well as cnc-milled into a 3d physical model that I could use for casting that would eventually become the glass, ceramic and metal sculptures.”
Woohoo has won over 50 awards including “Communication Arts Interactive Award for Self-promotion.”. Between creating art and programming in his “serious fun” labs, Woohoo was/will be a featured speaker and exhibitor at design conferences globally including: Art and Code (Pittsburgh), Grassy Knoll Gallery (Portland), PINK HOBO Gallery & FlashBelt (Minnesota), AIGA (Seattle), Flash on Tap (Boston), MAX (San Francisco, Singapore & Seoul), Flash In The Can (Toronto), Flash Forward (Seattle), Singularity (online), WDDC (Orlando), Flash on the Beach (Brighton, UK), Cinemathque: Slowtime2007 (online), File-Electronic Language International Festival (Rio de Janeiro & Sao Paulo), Adobe Design Gallery (online), Communication Arts Magazine (2007 Photography Annual), Best in the SW (Albuquerque), Lucania Film Festival (Lucania, Italy), DomeFest (Albuquerque), OutVideo International Video-art Festival (16 Russian cities), NAB (Las Vegas), OFFF: BCN (Barcelona), Center for ConteVisual Music Marathon (Boston) and SXSW (Austin). Woohoo’s work has also been included in Communication Arts, MocoLoco, IDn, Shift, Layers Magazine, Photoshop User Magazine, Adobe Design Gallery, the radio show Inside Digital Design and folly’s ArtCast in the UK.
CONTACT +1.505.967.9635 / drew@DrWoohoo.com / Press Kit
Recent Comments