Pixels shimmer, cascade and dissolve in full alpha channel glory in Dextro's first physical release. Subtitled '>110 Animations, Semi-Automatic' Dextro's 'A / Turux-B' compiles work created between 1995 and 2003 in a retrospective that celebrates the best aspects of emerging digital arts: availability, accessibility and - most importantly - affordability. Featuring 110 animations, 1,800 images and several movies 'A / Turux-B' is a work of (digital) art that anyone can afford and appreciate. Truly rewarding repeated exploration, it offers a glimpse of what Brian Eno once referred to as the open-ended future of "generative music". As systems within which the user interacts, albeit within pre-defined constraints, Dextro's compositional frameworks are seldom equalled. A pixel-perfect menu system that, once unravelled, operates with elegant simplicity and offers the key to unlocking a truly limitless set of possibilities - and once inside those possibilities it's hard to escape. There's no question that Dextro is mapping the outer margins of software's possible futures. One can only look forward to the rest of the world catching up. [CM], www.fallt.com/array/reviews/aturuxb, 2003 at the other extreme from the lowly screensaver and keyboard are sophisticated animation suites like macromedia director, which offer a readymade, programmable toolkit with plenty of built-in features. early interactive designers, however, restricted their use of this powerful tool to creating pulsing logos or morphing navigation bars for e-commerce sites. seen in this context, turux is a misuse of macromedia's software only in so far as it demonstrates the raw visual horsepower of these tools when they're not yoked to some mundane purpose. like levin's aves, each of turux's scores of interface allows users to click and drag their way to a dynamic abstract image: unlike aves, turux's excessive animation is staccato or pointillist, governed less by organic growth than by chaotic irregularities. clicking through a turux work is like trying to plot points on a graph while dropping acid. joline blais & jon ippolito: "at the edge of art": graph paper on acid, 2006 Early pioneers of generative Director programming, Dextro and Lia quickly became influential both inside and outside the Director community. Their mix of crisp pixels, erratic animation and blurred surfaces was unique at the time, presenting a perfect visual counterpoint to a musical scene experimenting with glitch and sound defects. Together, they produced Turux, a seminal web site which featured Director “soundtoys” and generative visual sketches. Thanks to the site’s intentionally cryptic interface design and the “anonymous author” fad popular with the Vienna artists (many of which used pseudonyms or group names), the authorship of Turux was unclear to outsiders. Often, visitors had no idea if Lia, Dextro or Turux were actual people or just project names. Nevertheless, Turux became an important reference for the nascent scene, its fame only heightened by its obscure origin. marius watz, generator x, 2005 Dextro is one of the pioneers of contemporary computer/web art. Since 1995 he runs dextro.org, his set of works on abstract graphic design and algorithmic animations. While in cooperation with lia he set up turux.org 1997–2005. Dextro has received numerous awards and reputation on the originality and ingenuity of his work. The event at the AA is a unique occassion since Dextro very hardly gives lectures and for this particular event he composed from scratch a thorough DVD illustrating the work and concepts about it. vasili stroumpakos, architects association school, london, aaschool.ac.uk, anlaesslich eines vortrags ueber meine arbeit ebendort, 2006 In the late 1990s, I started my short career as a graphic designer and web constructor, first in Toronto, then in Montreal. Just a couple of years earlier I’d wanted nothing to do with computers or the internet, and my growing interest in design was mainly analogue, inspired by early modernist designers in Russia and Germany. I wanted to be a designer, but using these older tools and methods. I liked that you could still see the tactility of that work, whether it was pencil traces left on paper, or the layered grain of photograms; that typography was redesigned with every project, rather than fonts reused; and I liked the onus on invention connected to grand social purpose. Two things finally drew me into the digital - my old friend Mat coercing me to spend a summer building websites with him, and my long-growing collection of (and fascination with), rave flyers, techno album cover art and, eventually, giant glossy books devoted to each (who remembers Localizer 1.0 ?). Increasingly, I was drawn to projects that combined design and scripting, often deconstructing the former through the latter. By 1999, my favourite of these was turux.org (1995-2003) and related sites silverserver.org/lia and dextro.org (where Turux is now archived). Turux projects were built with Macromedia’s Director software, the package used to build CD-ROMs before the web and, before that, games for the original 8-bit Nintendo. By the late-90s, Director was a sophisticated but bloated package capable of all sorts of integrated multimedia authoring including animation, scriptable non-linear timelines, and embedded video. The problem was that the Director’s outputted Shockwave movies were usually too heavy for dial-up internet and the software’s web-related features were really just tacked onto a package designed with very different purposes in mind. Director became a bit of a white elephant, replaced on one hand by interactive DVD discs, and on the other by Macromedia’s Flash which was built from the ground up to be the basis of interactive web apps. There’s no question that, on the whole, Flash is far better suited to the web. But what was lost in the switch was the anti-aesthetic environment of Director, with its primitive drawing tools, rough edges, awkward approach to layers and transparency, and script-focussed timeline. What we got in its place was the hegemony of the Flash aesthetic - smooooooth edges, heavily anti-aliased (i.e. no jaggedness) everything, cute things bouncing, solid colours, and absolute depthlessness (as if the photographic had never existed), except via the affected dimensionality of simple gradients (”Look! I’m 3D!”)). It had to be flat and vector based in order to bring flashy graphics to computers still running on dial-up connections. Turux was an alien in this environment. In small ways it had the markers of something going on obsolete, with its jagged-edged lines and characters, but these elements were subsumed by something utterly futuristic looking (or maybe from a potential present that never caught on). It relied on vectors as well, but built with a set of tools that was far less pretty and prescriptive of an aesthetic than the ones in Flash. Many of the site’s most beautiful pieces exploited an odd feature in Director’s animation controls, the “trails” setting which causes any moving object to leave images of itself in its wake. It’s easy to do, but it’s difficult to make it look good. On Turux, however, it became a whole new aesthetic - pixelated elements dancing with ghostly gradients. The site’s animations made amazing use of simple shapes, transparency, and non-anti-aliased characters, set into steady motion and leaving semi-translucent reverberations in their paths. That the motion is caused by a combination of keyframe animation, user interaction and the seemingly chaotic tangents of vector equations, gave them an alien and vaguely life-like (or intelligent) quality. What strikes me now, looking back on the archived Turux pieces, is how much they actually have in common (visually, at least) with some of the Soviet art and design that first grabbed my attention when I was younger, especially the more adventurous works of artists like El Lissitzky. Lissitzky’s five-year long Proun series, running from the early- to mid-1920s, was the source of some of the most iconic imagery of the Soviet project at its most experimental. He styled himself a “constructor” - not a painter or artist, but a social technician via design - of a new utopian order and Proun was what he named his “project for the affirmation of the new.” Prounen, like the ones below, took off from Suprematism’s fixation on pure form, but shifted its flat geometry into 3-dimensional space where experiments in dynamic spatial relations and perspectival multiplicity (both entrenched modernist obsessions by the end of WWI) could be conceived. For Lissitzky and other artists working for the new Soviet regime, such works represented initial theorisations (abstract machines, in a sense) towards new utopian approaches to architecture, urbanism and industry which, together, would could carry Russia into the modern industrial age. If Dextro’s abstract machines have a politics, then the link is less overt, although they do belong to a period in the history of the net (remember when we still wondered if e-commerce would take off?) when an utopian idealism about its potential as a free space, generating new realms of the social, still had some valence. And, if my memory is correct, the original Turux.org was connected with Austrian anti-racist organisations and anarchist-leaning social movements. But my point is that Dextro was ultimately working with many of the same concerns that drove Lissitzky - multiplicity, dynamism, shifting axes, the potential of new technologies to generate new forms - only at the other end of the modern project; the other end but not post. Turux was very much a “project for the affirmation of the new.” There was nothing retrospective, ironic or conciliatory about it. Like the Prounen, it created an abstract space apart where the new forms could be tested. Only unlike Lissitzky, Dextro worked with the potentials of chaos, rather than asserting a totalising order. Movement could be shown rather than implied. And, using the tools of the digital constructor, Dextro built abstract machines for the exploration of user-responsive forms in 4-dimensional space, with axes and planes swinging through one another, engaging the user to a point, but seeming just a little impervious as well. You can still see the Turux collection at dextro.org. Better still, as of May you can buy the collection on CD-ROM, guaranteed not to become another piece of monumental ephemera lost in the shifting sands of the web. www.deeptime.net/blog, 2003 (...) looking through the pages, i couldnt help but get the feeling that i was witnessing the beginning of some vast cultural display, some immense project that would continue to grow and document...well...document whatever it is that's being documented here! but thats for dextro to know and us to find out. (...) something big is growing there. tor hyams and david scharff: "fierce, the exclusive book for web elitists", usa 1999 (...) Was ist es nun, was dextros Arbeiten auszeichnet? Ein augenfälliger, gemeinsamer Nenner ist in jedem Fall die radikale und konsequente Gegenstandslosigkeit in all seinen Werken. Sämtliche Arbeiten sind gänzlich a-mimetisch, sie stellen nichts dar oder nach, sondern folgen ausschliesslich eigenen, rein visuellen, bildimmanenten Gesetzlichkeiten. Es sind nicht so sehr die verwendeten Formen oder Farben, denn diese variieren durchaus, die seine Werke bestimmen, sondern vielmehr die besondere Dynamik der Bilder, eine ganz spezielle Form der optischen Spannung, die innerhalb des Bildrahmens etabliert wird. Diese Spannungszentren, von denen sich oft mehrere innerhalb einer Bildkomposition befinden, definieren den visuellen Inhalt. Seine mit äußerster visueller Sensibilität gestalteten, gegenstandslosen Kompositionen sind stets asymmetrisch und weisen dynamisch verschobene und verzogene Winkel auf. Häufig laufen die abstrakten Formationen scheinbar über den stets rechtwinkeligen Bildrand hinaus, so als würden sie sich unendlich forsetzten. Das Zusammentreffen der orthogonalen Bildbegrenzung mit den wild wuchernden Bildelementen bewirkt eine starke Dynamisierung der Bildoptik. Nicht nur die visuelle Gestalt der zumeist filigranen, grafischen Elemente, sondern vor allem die Relationen zwischen den Formen und Farben sind bestimmend für den dynamischen Gesamteindruck. Trotz der inneren Spannung der Kompositionen wirken die Werke meist äußerst hermetisch, sie sind in sich vollendet und nach aussen hin abgeschlossen. (...) Diese befremdlich-schönen, rein mathematisch generierten Welten funktionieren ausschliesslich nach eigenen Gesetzlichkeiten und vermitteln nicht das Gefühl dass sie für einen aussenstehenden Rezipienten geschaffen wurden oder einen solchen überhaupt benötigen würden. Es stellt sich in der Rezeptionssituation viel eher das Gefühl einer zufälligen Sichtung, einer beglückenden, (meta-)physichen Beobachtung ein. Es ist als müsste man selber ganz leise sein, denn ein Husten oder Räuspern würde die flüchtigen, schwerelosen Erscheinungen auf dem Bildschirm sofort vertreiben. norbert pfaffenbichler fuer kolik magazin, wien 2009 Once you enter the world woven together by Dextro's artwork, you will notice that a mysterious appeal lurks beneath the beautiful surface. It's a charm that makes one aware of relationships like "micro and macro" or "order and chaos" not unlike the "mysteries of life" apparent when viewing plants, microscopic images of microbes, or perhaps visuals from outer space taken by satellites. While Dextro has been in a league of his own since the days when glimpses of algorithmic art were just beginning to appear amongst web creators, he has to this day continued to keep his real name a secret and reject commercialistic concepts in what could be called a questioning of authoritarian ideologies. All of this may paint Dextro out to be a bit of a rebel, however his hard-and-fast thoughts on his creative endeavors identify him as possessing the unblemished spirit of a true artist. nahoko mori for +81 magazine, tokyo 2010