Rain, 1992/2019, kinetic painting produced using the Kinetic Painting Program coded on a PC with a Windows operating system, 6 minutes, 32 seconds. Courtesy of the artist and Sfeir-Semler Gallery Beirut/Hamburg.
Since beginning her career in the late 1950s, Palestinian artist and scholar Samia Halaby has created a personal vocabulary of abstraction based in painting, but spreading quickly to experiments with technology. After leaving the Yale School of Art in the United States (where she was the first woman to be hired as a full-time Assistant Professor) in the 1980s, Halaby began advancing her painterly interest in geometry and the science of visual perception by experimenting with digital technology. Halaby has described how the discovery of the computer as a medium, when she was an artist in her fifties, brought delight in the beauty of programming. She learned the programming languages Basic and C and developed short programs that allowed her to create digital paintings that the Amiga 1000 performed on command. Later, during the 1990s, she programmed a PC, creating an application for her own use that converted the keyboard into an “abstract painting piano” with which she produced kinetic paintings from extensive sets of functions and color palettes. First using the program for small and informal performances with musicians—notably Kevin Nathaniel and Hasan Bakr on African analog percussion, and more recently with Johnny Tomasiello on electronics—Halaby has since become known as a pioneer of computer-based kinetic art.
At different points in the exhibition, the Taipei Biennial 2023 features four video works from a 2019 performance of the Kinetic Painting Group—the heading under which Halaby works with others to publicly perform her painting program—which transpose Halaby’s joyful painting sensibility into a domain of computational and geometrical precision. The effortless expressivity of Halaby’s kinetic paintings is tied to the spontaneity and unexpectedness of performance, but also reflect Halaby’s desire to create in a collaborative manner, transforming the traditionally solitary act of painting into a process more akin to a musicians’ jam session.
Performance by the Kinetic Painting Group at Goddard Riverside Community Center, New York City, May 21, 2019
Musicians: Kevin Nathaniel, musical director (mbira); Hasan Bakr (percussion, tambourine); Famoro Dioubaté (balafon); Tomchess (oud).
