Bill Miller

A. Bill Miller, Assistant Professor of Visual Arts, at Penn State Altoona. He earned his MFA at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He also served as an Associate Lecturer at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and as an Instructor at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design. His nationally and internationally exhibited works include his acclaimed Gridworks Project, which comprises abstract ASCII drawings, ink drawings, animated GIFs, and video elements. See more;

"Over the last few years I've developed a workflow that starts very simply and then expands and becomes more complex. I begin by creating text documents - *.txt - that are really drawings using ASCII. The first 160 or so of these drawings are all in one long plaintext file starting with #001 at the very bottom. Later, I was turned on to a small java application for creating ASCII Art called JavE. Its made the work a quicker but hasn't necessarily changed the drawings all that much."

"Some of the work becomes larger compositions for digital print. To achieve these I make larger compositions by pasting in the text from the original ASCII drawings. Because its text - or type - its easy to manipulate using basic properties like size, rotation, color, blend mode… Usually in this work I explore something aesthetic or formal like indications of 3D space using only layered type. I'm interested in this because its a way of creating a digital environment using elements that make up language but do not create words.

"My art practice has a great deal to do with repetition. I repeat the same process over and over again with endlessly different results. In a way it mimics the generative processes of a computer program. The reason for this is that I'm fascinated by grid systems and their potential to be both rigid and fluid/flexible at the same time. Each work I create is an exploration of the individual units that make up a grid system and how they related to the system as a whole."