Inspired by the slash paintings of Lucio Fontana - Data Spills explores the aesthetic transformations that occur when video game software is cut, spilling program logic into the representational layer.
In 1958, Fontana began a series of works that came to be known as his slash paintings. These pieces generally consist of a monochromatic canvas which has been marked by one or more cuts. Data Spills is a remediation of Fontana's work for a screen-based medium. This shift in context is central to the work - what happens when one slashes a program or piece of software? Code does not tear like a stretched canvas, but it does break in its own visually unique way.
Fontana's slash paintings brought the background into the foreground of the work. Software may be viewed in layers as well with back-end program logic and a front-facing user interface. More specifically, video games consist of data structures which govern the mechanics, interaction, and flow of the game world along with the graphics that represent that world to the player. In order to tear through the graphics layer some initial modifications were accomplished through manual hex editing of binary files, after determining the specifics of data organization within these video games. Through a process of incremental manipulation, ruptures in the representational layer of these games were created, allowing program logic to bleed out into the screen space. Once the constraints to this approach were established, further development involved a series of algorithms designed to load the games into byte arrays and carry out more complex operations on the memory space procedurally.
