Daniel Jackson
Daniel Jackson has been working with computing as a medium since the late 1980s. In the mid 1990s he worked in the field of Virtual Reality and was an executive producer in computer games.
Since then he has been creating animations, paintings and writing software. His recent works are all automated in some way - he explores where the aesthetics of a work meet the arbitrary. There is an inherent artificial intelligence to the output in that decisions are taken away from the artist and left to chance; the results are mechanical and random in one sense but carefully constructed by the structures and rules of the software. The code becomes the space within which the pieces perform using simple visual and/or linguistic elements.
The works are subjected to an editing, either in the form of rejection of the software output or the control of certain elements, for example colour palettes, or rhythmic structures. The process is cyclical involving the continual re-writing and refinement of the software and then re-editing of the output.
A notable example of his work was ‘Extraction’, a laptop placed on Freud’s desk at the Freud Museum in 2004. The laptop was running the bespoke software ‘Extraction’, which was removing and displaying one by one all the words from Freud’s ‘Interpretation of Dreams’.
