About
“My work engages chance as a means of breaking habitual modes of thought. I invite chance in the service of creating something beyond my limitations. Software and interactors (people) are the determinants in this process. It is up to the viewer to provide narrative (order and simplification) or to abandon the rational in favor of a more transcendental experience.” – Lincoln Schatz
These ideas were fully implemented into Lincoln Schatz’s artistic practice in 2000, when he made the transition from sculptural objects to generative video work.
As a result, Schatz focused on ways to create generative systems that utilize chance to produce variable outcomes. Long central to his work was the desire to merge artistic practice with the everyday experience of life, which is replete with its compounding accrual of information. Combined with a lifelong pursuit of photography, this led Lincoln Schatz to develop Generative Video Portraits in 2001.
Chance is the methodology for all selections. New possibilities are proposed through a nonlinear assemblage of video and over time, it is statistically improbable that any combination of video would ever repeat. The combinations and re-combinations of video create an infinite number of paths. New ways of seeing emerge. Through this means, Lincoln Schatz has realized portraits of domestic environments, high-rise tower construction, prominent cultural figures, and large-scale public interaction.