An image, created from application of circular adhesive stickers, that recreates Signac’s 1909 painting, Pine Tree at Saint-Tropez.
This work was assembled from a 12-color set of 8mm-diameter circular stickers that I purchased online. It references the pointillist style of painting that is perhaps most closely associated with Georges Seurat. But, of course, the dots in this work come from manufactured stickers rather than application of paint. As such, this work relies on industrial processes that make no reference to the hand of the artist.
Placement of the stickers was guided by the use of what turned out to be a fairly complicated computer program, which was designed to optimize (by some specified standard) the fit between the output image and an input reference image. In this case (contrary to the title of the work), the reference image was Pine Tree at Saint-Tropez (1909) by another great pointillist, Paul Signac. A key constraint in the optimization process was the fixed number of stickers of each of the 12 colors that came in the purchased set.
A number of variants of the computer program were tested, all of which to some extent were designed to force local color variation into the resulting image. This was intended to follow the spirit of pointillist principles of optical color mixing, in which small dots of (often complementary) color are placed adjacent to one another to produce a vibrant color field. In the end, I chose to use the program configuration that seemed, to me, to produce the output image that best captured the essence of the Signac painting.
Although the initial planning step was computer assisted, the physical application of the stickers was, of course, done manually. There were over 5500 stickers applied in this work. As with other industrial processes, then, the final product emerges from the interplay between automation and human labor.
