Signature

Signature is a generative collection I made in 2023 with Red Bull Racing and Art on Internet, built on Art Blocks Engine. The subject is the victory burnout, the loops of black rubber a driver leaves on the track after a race won by tight engineering. Each output is a set of looping tire marks laid over one another. I set the range of possibilities and randomness makes each one.

The marks look free, but they come out of a controlled system. Press N and the work shows the data behind each signature, the rotations and the total circumference, with the sum in the bottom right corner. The gesture becomes a measurement.

On release day I wrote that in both collections, Signature and its companion Trademark, the ® stands for either motion between two points or "the mark left after practicing one's trade (in f1, the burnout)". Signature is the second reading. A car does the practicing and a random seed decides how the mark lands.

Harold Rosenberg's "The American Action Painters" ran in ARTnews in December 1952 and gave action painting its name. His claim is that at a certain moment the canvas began to look to one American painter after another like "an arena in which to act," and that "what was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event." He tells the viewer to change vocabulary to match, to think about "inception, duration, direction." That list reads almost like the info layer. You can only describe these marks by how they were made, and the work hands you the numbers.

The part of the essay I keep rereading is the warning near the end. Rosenberg had no patience for easy painting, the painter who keeps himself on hand "solely to collect the benefits of an endless series of strokes of luck." He calls the result "apocalyptic wallpaper." Then he goes further. Once the real difficulty is gone, "a unique signature comes to seem the equivalent of a new plastic language," and the man who set out to remake himself "has made himself into a commodity with a trademark."

He meant it as a charge against the artist. Seventy-one years later I released two collections on the same day and called them Trademark and Signature.

A generative system is a series of strokes of luck by design, so Rosenberg would probably file every output under wallpaper. About any single image he might have a point. What his frame misses is where the decision went. It moved out of the wrist and into the rules: the subject, the range, what the info layer shows and what it leaves out.

Three weeks after launch I wrote that "any signature drawn 'organically' (by a human) is absolutely unique, even if visually similar." These are not drawn by hand. The uniqueness comes from the code that guarantees the randomness. In the same thread I put it as "attribution, provenance, proof," different lenses on one set of questions raised by the ability to distribute consensus and verify independently.

Signature #0 was shown at Gateway Miami in December 2023 and sold at Christie's.