Painting by Numbers - by Ken Feinstein

( See www.unprimed.com)

What is a digital image? If it is an image created by the manipulation of digits by a program, then Rajinder Singh’s portraits are digital art. The fact that he doesn’t use a computer is irrelevant. An issue for those who need to protect their fiefdom’s. What is happening is a very complex and dense use of numbers and mathematics. How do we use numbers? What does it say? What can it say? What can’t it say?

The theorist Vilem Flusser has written about how the text as image came to a crisis point in the early 20th century.1 The crisis was came about when the written word became incomprehensible. to make his point, he doesn’t go to Joyce or the Surrealists, but to Einstein. E=mc2, a simple statement that means more than it can contain. How do we understand this? e go back to visual images. Images based on concepts, mathematics and technology. What Flusser calls the “technical image”. An not an image of technique, but an image of technology. Singh’s images are images of both technique and technology. They pile numbers upon numbers, until images appear. The text passes through its own crisis of meaning, coming through the other side as pure image. A face, the face of a woman springs out of the numbers. the theoretical comes back to the human. How he got there remains unreadable, but we don’t care. We have arrived with him to a gaze that looks back at us as much as we look at it.

This gaze is made of numbers literally piled on top of each other. Mapping the face as we do a mountain. Singh asked where can we find the emotion in numbers. This is where it is, in the peaks and valleys of the face. The building up of layers of colour tagged to different number sets. These numbers sets could be stock quotes, flight schedules, scores from the Premier League, the seemly disconnected events, which make up our life. And we turn to the face to se the culmination of our life. We “read” a face for this. The cliche goes that the eyes are the windows of the soul, but the face is the map of experience.

Singh began this collection of faces by asking where is the “lovely” in mathematics. Einstein defined the best scientific and mathematical solutions as the simplest and most elegant. The most elegant is an aesthetic judgement. Here is the art in math. We understand, no we expect the aesthetic judgement in art. The aesthetic helps us define the form of the language of art. Like the rules for the construction of a sentence. Math being among other things the language of science. Yet Einstein is defining the scientific by the artistic. Wittgenstein proved that something can not be defined as a subset of itself. So we have to go elsewhere to define what makes the scientific. The amateur violinist Einstein knows that we have to go to an older system to legitimate the scientific system. If the aesthetic can be used to define science and math is its language than the lovely can be found there. Humming through with Pythagorus’ celestial harmonies. We should never forget that math and music are tied so tightly together that it can be hard to untangle them.

The lovely is not found in the numbers themselves, but in how the numbers are used. The place where the digits are used to create meaning. Many philosophers have agreed that meaning is created by the relationship, the give and take of the conversation. This conversation can be between people or a work of art and a viewer, a book and a reader or even a mathematician and an algorithm. The relational is the core of the artistic experience. It is a conversation each side enters into. Jean-Franзios Lyotard sees this as part of game theory2. Emmanuel Levinas finds G-d there3.

Here we are back to the gaze. the work looks at us knowing that we are looking at it. It is a gaze looking for its return. The return is the play of the game. We set the rules and we engage. It is Lyotard’s conversation. It is the relational. An inclusive act. An ethical act. An act which as draws on in to respond, to finish the conversation. Because with out the other of the viewer, it is just a monologue going out to nowhere. The work calls, we respond. It asks, we answer. We may ask of the work and demand an answer back, but we can not do this with out answering first.

Play, playfulness, things we forget to think about with art any more. As statements like this one are written and as theorists become critics, works are discussed very solemnly. Maybe too solemnly. Singh’s paintings are combining two things that are playful in nature algorithms and painting. Algorithms are an important element in game theory. Game theory drives much of the mathematics being developed today. It is used in creating the probabilities used for forecasting the weather, quantum mechanics and managing hedge funds. But at its heart is the concept of play. Flusser talks about play in relation to the use of an apparatus, such as a computer.4 We experiment when we play. We try it one way and then try it another until we like what we get. This is the way we live in our digital world. Every day as we use our computers more and more we are playing more and more. It has become the nature of how we work. It is the nature of how we create work. It is some thing we have learned from art. It is how we can strive to find the lovely in numbers, art or life. Here is where Rajinder Singh finds his worlds coming together.


1 Flusser, Vilйm. Towards a Philosophy of Photography, Reaktion Books, London, 2000.
2 Thebaud, Jean-Loup and Jean-Franзois Lyotard. Just Gaming, University of Minnesota Press, 1985
3 Levinas, Emanuel. Entre Nous: Thinking-of-the-Other, Continuum Internationa Publishing Group, 2006.
4 Flusser, Vilйm. Towards a Philosophy of Photography, Reaktion Books, London, 2000.


Ken Feinstein is multimedia artist & theorist. Both his written and art works address the relationship of the work of art and the audience. He has been exhibited in museums & galleries in China, Japan, Germany, South Africa, Russia as well as the United States. His last solo show was Let A Thousand Videos Bloom at the Chelsea Art Museum, New York in 2004

He is currently an Associate Professor in the School of Art, Design, & Media at Nanyang Technical University in Singapore. See www.kennethfeinstein.com