The Artwork of 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.”

Awards, Conferences & Festivals
Woohoo has won over 50 awards including Communication Arts Interactive award for self-promotion. He has/will exhibit(ed) his work and/or was a speaker at:


2009
- Flash on the Beach, Brighton, UK, September 21-23rd
- FlashBelt, Minneapolis, MN, June 7-10th
- Flash on Tap: Boston, May 28-30th
- FITC: Toronto, April 26-28
- Grassy Knoll Gallery, Portland, OR (First solo show), April 2 - August 28th
- Grassy Knoll Gallery, Portland, OR (Workshop on writing scripts, applications and flash plug-ins that extend Photoshop and Illustrator), April 1 6pm
- Art and Code, Pittsburgh, PA, March 7-9th
- Photoshop User Magazine: Featured Article, March Issue

2008
- FITC goes to Max, Nov.
- Adobe Max: San Francisco, Nov.
- Universidad Iberoamerica in Mexico, Nov.
- Conference, Online, October
- Create Chaos 08 - Orlando, Fl, October
- Flash on the Beach, September
- FITC: Toronto, April
- folly's ArtCast.
- Moo.com: Designers Gallery
- Adobe Design Gallery
- File-Rio-2008, the Electronic Language International Festival in Rio

2007
- Flash On The Beach, Brighton Beach, UK, November
- Communication Arts Magazine, Photography Annual - Article on In The Mod
- Adobe Max: Europe (Barcelona), October
- Best in the SW Flash Animation & Motion Graphics Conference, October
- Cinemathque: Slowtime2007: Quicktime as an artistic medium.
- FILE-2007, the Electronic Language International Festival from August 20th- to September 16th-, in Sao Paulo City
- Lucania Film Festival from August 11-15, 2007 in Lucania, Italy
- DomeFest, Albuquerque, NM
- The OutVideo '07 International video-art festival from July 5 - August 5 and will tour 16 different Russian cities
- Visual Music Marathon (Boston)
- MegaBytes 6, Center for Contemporary Arts (Santa Fe)
- Futuresonic 2007: Urban Festival of Art, Music + Ideas in Manchester, UK
- I/WE: Case Studies, SCAD-Atlanta Show
- SXSW (Austin)

2006
- MAX (Singapore & Seoul)
- Flash Forward (Seattle)
- NAB (Las Vegas)
- OFFF: BCN (Barcelona)
- MegaBytes 4, Center for Contemporary Arts (Santa Fe)

2005
- AIGA (Seattle)