CHARISMATIC MEGAPIGMENT, 2019

Acrylic on canvas, 10” screen, webcam, Apple Mac Mini, steel frame
Collaboration with Tobias Revell and Wesley Goatley
London College of Communication, University of the Arts London
London Design Festival

Charismatic Megapigment is a sculptural installation that stages a dialogue between painting and machine vision. Installed within a steel frame apparatus, a large green painting is subjected to continuous digital scrutiny. A mechanised screen traverses the canvas while a webcam captures its surface and feeds the live image into a machine learning system.

The system searches a dataset of over 102,000 Google-sourced images associated with the term “green,” generating a closest-neighbour match in real time. The painting becomes both object and input, its chromatic and formal properties translated into data and recontextualised through algorithmic association.

The work examines the politicised and culturally loaded nature of the colour green, shifting between environmental symbolism, digital chroma key, finance, military camouflage and ideological branding. At the same time, it interrogates tensions between formalist abstraction and conceptual systems. A monochromatic painting, traditionally read in terms of surface, composition and pigment, is reconfigured as material for computational analysis.

Positioned within a visible metal structure, the apparatus makes the process explicit. Cables, hardware and screen form part of the sculptural language, collapsing distinctions between studio practice and technological infrastructure. The installation extends ongoing concerns within the practice around mediation, perception and the instability of images in a networked culture. Here, colour is no longer fixed to surface but circulates between paint, code and search engine logic, revealing how meaning is produced through both aesthetic and algorithmic systems.