Joshua Davis: Infinitely Interesting
Joshua Davis is a design troublemaker. “A lot of printers ask me how I created my work,” he says mischievously. “Because technically, it’s not actually possible.”
Davis creates electronically generated graphic compositions of almost unimaginable complexity and individuality. Equally at home with print and electronic media, he builds his own Flash-based programs to combine and recombine colors borrowed from nature with forms that include organic shapes, text elements, and other symbols.
The resulting works of “dynamic abstraction,” as Davis calls them, are fluid, intricate, and unique as snowflakes. There’s an ephemeral quality even to his print work, which captures a single variation in a potentially endless sequence of design permutations.
“Working this way allows me to generate an infinite number of compositions,” Davis explains. “I set the boundaries and the rules, but whatever comes out at the end is a surprise. I don’t know what’s going to happen. It could look cool. It could fail. It could be life-changing. There’s always a surprising sense of discovery with this process, because I’m setting up an environment and allowing a scenario to live within it.”
Davis’s method also lets him quickly generate related designs for multiple media, from web animation to large-format print to video.
“There are so many random variables that I never get the same design twice,” he notes. “And since I work with programming, I can do things I would never dream of doing manually. For example, I might say, ‘Let’s draw a seahorse, then add it in again 20,000 times.’ Believe me, I don’t want to be the guy that’s sitting there copying and pasting a seahorse 20,000 times. But a program can do it in less than a second.”
Davis laughs. “The most complex print I’ve done had 120,000 layers in Illustrator. The printer called and said, ‘How did you do this? How long did it take?’ And I said, ‘Oh, five minutes.’”
The Anti-Artist
In his Mineola, New York studio, Davis moves effortlessly between commercial and noncommercial design. He’s created web-based promotions for clients like Sony, Nokia, and Volkswagen, and his pieces have been shown at New York’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, London’s Tate Modern, and Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. He teaches at the School for Visual Arts in Manhattan, and speaks at workshops and conferences worldwide.
“I’ve always done kind of weird, strange things, and that’s what I get hired to do: weird, strange things,” he says. “The type of work you make is the type of work people will hire you to do.”
Davis became a major force in web design during the dot-com era, writing a book and creating multiple websites to showcase his work, including praystation.com and once-upon-a-forest.com. He also hosted the now-defunct dreamless.org, an occasionally contentious forum for design insiders that originated the Internet phenomenon of “Photoshop battles.”
Despite his art-world credentials, Davis says he considers himself a designer, not an artist: “I’m not going to say, ‘Oh, I’m a fine artist.’ Sure, I make design as art — for Art Basel Miami Beach in December, I’m doing a whole series of exhibitions on design as art. And if you strip away all the product stuff in a corporate client’s campaign, you still might want to hang it on your wall. But design is generally a broader and more difficult endeavor than art. When you’re working with corporations and brands like Motorola or Nike, you’re adapting your own style to a pre-existing brand. To me that’s more challenging than doing art.”
Painting with Software
Davis began experimenting with programming languages in the mid-1990s while studying painting and illustration at Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute. “My first foray into computing was with Linux on a 286 and a 386 DX2-66,” he recalls. “PCs were ridiculous; DOS was useless. But Linux was only 30 bucks — it was included at the back of the book!”
As he learned more about programming and design, Davis began to merge the two. “I used a program called FutureSplash Animator, which became the first version of Flash,” he says. “It was really more geared toward animators, but for some reason each year I’d pick up the new build. Finally, with Flash 4, they added a scripting language. I was already pretty comfortable with languages like Perl and Python and JavaScript and DHTML, so suddenly I had this combination of vector-based design tool and programming environment. And everything fell into place.”
In his current programs, Davis uses patterns of motion based on natural, semi-random processes like flowing water, wind, and insect movements. “I might write 200 programs, and 199 of them suck, just to get that one that works,” he says. “Or I might take ten of those scripts and combine them into one big master script to generate artwork. Some have animation. Some are static. Some are grid-based, and some are more random. I might write one program with a certain structure, then another with a completely different structure. Actually, right now I’m trying to adopt one base structure that all my programs adhere to.”
Once Davis has determined which elements to combine, much of his creative process involves watching and waiting as the programs arrange his forms into different configurations. “I might spend two weeks just waiting for that perfect composition, that beautiful accident,” says Davis. “I decide what to keep, what to add, and what to eliminate. I have the best job in the world: I get to be the designer, the programmer, and the critic!”
