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"Campos ❘ Temporales" by Paul Hertz

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Campos | Temporales (2022 - 2023) was developed as a large scale architectural video installation for 150 Media Stream, a curated video exhibition space in the lobby of 150 Riverside Plaza in Chicago. A musical composition by Christopher Walczak was presented on opening night. An ambient electronic sound track by Walczak accompanies the installation, which runs through December 2022. The opening night performance ensemble included Eric Mandat, clarinet; Emily Rach Beisel, saxophone; Jason Roebke, bass; Chris Butler, percussion; Christopher Walczak, electronic sound; with Richard Kelley conducting.

The animation for the installation involves transforming audio signals into pixel values and writing them to a space-filling curve, typically a Hilbert Curve. The curve visits every pixel in an image in a symmetrical labyrinthine pattern. The regular patterns of waves in the one-dimensional audio signal form two-dimensional patterns in the resulting image. The patterns are animated by cyclic changes in phase, color and amplitude, resulting shimmering illusions of motion, swirling pixels, flowing colors, and coalescing and dispersing of abstract images, at various overlapping scales and speeds.

Paul Hertz is an independent artist, printmaker, and curator who works with algorithmic processes. From 1971 to 1983, he lived and worked in Spain, where he collaborated with actors and musicians. He earned a BA in Fine Arts from Brown University (1971) and an MFA in Time Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1985), where he was a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Studies in Art and Technology. He taught courses in the theory, practice, and art history of new media at Northwestern University (1995–2004) and at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2011–2018).