Ritesh Lala

Lives and works in New York, NY

Artist statement

I am a New Media Artist and Creative Technologist working across the full range of the digital medium — real-time graphics, audio, and 3D sculpture, driven by algorithms that often respond to the viewers' movements and gestures. My work softens the boundaries between seemingly divergent or opposite concepts — solidity and motion, nature and the digital canvas, entropy and form, image and sound. I create complex systems from simple algorithmic rules and explore how they are affected by forces of expansion and contraction (e.g. Flow). Like a potter shaping clay to make vessels, algorithms extrude 3d forms from mandala blueprints and give them shape with recursive geometric curves. Unlike physical pottery, these undulate between probable forms, marking the constant churning of time (as in the Mandala Pottery series). I compose videos of light reflecting off of these fluxing structures and translate them to sound with signal-processing techniques applied frame-by-frame, thus creating a synesthetic audio-visual whole (e.g. Mainframe Meditations). This same tension between nature and the digital canvas drives my Speculative Nature series, where nature inhabits the algorithmic medium instead of merely being depicted by it, mutating pixels with its own forces. In Plume, abstract geometric feathers emerge as shrubs and groves forever undulating. In Hysteresis, that same push and pull of expansion and contraction becomes a feedback loop: a system of interconnected nodes is...

Artwork