Steve Roden describes himself as a “painter who also works with sound.” Roden discusses the drawings from his youth that launched him on a trajectory towards generative art. He describes the coding behind several of his works, which include color-coded drawings correlating to the letters on a book page, models generated by the vowels in the names of lunar geological formations, paintings that were translations of the phrase “the silent world,” and audio work that was a translation of color names mentioned in a chapter of a book. The common thread in all of these works is that none of them can be traced back to the original input.
Roden talks about his audio-visual works with architectural implications. Here he describes the audio recordings that he made in and for the Schindler House, which, when played back in certain areas of the property gave the listener an abstract sense of the space. He also describes projects inspired by Wallace Neff’s airform dome work, the Serpentine Gallery by Alvaro Siza Vieira, and a church by Dimitri Pikionis. In one of the rare occasions that Roden worked with others, he describes a full-scale installation done with Caltech engineers.
Roden concludes his lecture by talking about a project he had been working on at the time of this lecture. Here Roden describes how he goes back to generative modeling, but has aspirations for the process to work at an architectural scale. This project was indirectly a continuation of his project with the Caltech engineers, about which he admits his dissatisfaction.
