Transfer is pleased to present ‘Language and Code, a collaborative exhibition from A Bill Miller and Daniel Temkin presenting alternative ‘aesthetic’ experiences with language. In their recent practice, both artists explore the ways in which human/machine language patterns and new semantics emerge in conversation with our post-digital era. Through their work with language systems for communication with – and within – technological systems, space has been opened for conceptual and arbitrary inclusions. The interaction between human and machine becomes one of shifting, expanding, unstable language constructs. This exhibition presents Temkin and Miller’s recent explorations into these shared concerns.

A. Bill Miller’s gridCycles is a suite of browser-based animations that opens a speculative visual text system sampled from the gridCycles narrative field. Each version is generated as an environment that contemplates the individual and the whole, the system and its self similar parts, an image/text cosmology. gridCycles are free-floating environments drawn from phrases with denotative meanings and functions as a multiplicity of image as language and language as communication. For this exhibition Miller presents the piece as a suite of browser-based and printed works.

Daniel Temkin’s Light Pattern is a programming language that uses photos in the place of text for source code. In a daily photo practice, Temkin attempts to communicate with the machine by producing images according to the specifications of the compiler. The Hello, World! series is built with incidental images, arranged to produce the most basic of programs. Although the machine disregards the content of the photos (reading them purely in technical terms), the images produce secondary meanings; moments of affect which come naturally to human communication, even when actively discouraged.

Other programs engage the subject matter of their source code, such as the Recursive Program. This program is created by an automated camera and filter wheel (controlled by Arduino) that photographs itself in the mirror in order to build a program that calls itself in endless repetition.

A. BILL MILLER, (b. 1978, USA) an Assistant Professor of Art and Design at University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, earned his MFA at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He has exhibited and screened his abstract ASCII drawings, animated GIFs, web browser-based compositions, and videos nationally and internationally. In 2013, his solo show “Gridworks” opened at TRANSFER Gallery. In November 2013, A. Bill Miller curated one of 30 international pavilions for The Wrong, a new digital Art biennale. Bill also regularly performs and experiments with live audio/visuals using custom software patches. His performances have been done in traditional gallery exhibitions as well as Technology, Art, and Music Festivals including VIA Pittsburgh in 2011 and Slingshot Athens GA in 2014.

More information at master-list2000.com/abillmiller

DANIEL TEMKIN (b. 1973, USA) makes images, programming languages, and interactive pieces exploring our inherently broken patterns of thought and the clash between human and algorithmic thinking. Daniel has spoken widely to both art and hacker audiences, at Media Art History (Liverpool 2011 and Riga 2013), CAA, GLI.TC/H conference in 2010 and 2012 (where he led a three-day session on Glitch and Oulipo), Notacon, and Hackers on Planet Earth, among others. He appeared on PBS’s OffBook episode on Glitch Art. His writing has been published in academic journals such as World Picture and Media-N Journal and has been taught at Bard College, Penn State, and Clark University.

Daniel received his MFA from International Center of Photography / Bard College in 2012. His work has been featured at American University Museum, Christopher Henry Gallery, Higher Pictures and Carroll/Fletcher.

More information is available at danieltemkin.com