Personal Project

Rhinotillexomania

Rhinotillexomania
/ɹaɪnəʊtɪˌlɛksəˈmeɪniə/
"a condition that causes a person to compulsively pick their nose"

Nose-picking or "nasa bora" - besides it's actual meaning - means having nothing to do, at least in the local Austrian dialect that I grew up with.

My ongoing series Rhinotillexomania explores algorithmically generated artificial organisms. Shape, color, size and other attributes are decided by a set of ground rules and then automatically generated and rendered by the hundreds over the course of many hours. I then go through the output and find interesting specimen, taking note of their attributes and tweak the algorithm to generate more organisms, slowly steering it towards what's aesthetically pleasing.

The act of setting up the rules, hitting render and having having nothing to do but wait (nasa bora) until the next day to be able to judge the outcomes has a wonderfully slow and analogue quality to it, similar to how wild-life photographers set up night-vision traps to capture the shiest forest creatures, then returning to check their cameras the next day only to realise that the focus was off (which definitely also happened here a couple of times).

In October 2021 I got a selection of these organisms printed on postcards and sent them to 50 of my social media followers around the world, together with little haikus I wrote (some of which were really funny if I dare to say so myself)
If you happen to read this and want a postcard too shoot me an email, I might still have some left (I'll pay for postage of course).