The following is an excerpt from a catalog essay by Irene Hofmann, executive director of the Contemporary Museum in Baltimore.

With dynamic forms, hypnotic movements, and a luminous palette, Shirley Shor creates artworks that seduce and delight. Part of an emerging generation of new-media artists who are redefining how computers can be engaged in the creation of work, Shor makes real-time computer-generated animations and installations that engage the spatial and temporal. In Shor’s works, animated fields of color, surface and line are in perpetual fluid motion, expanding, merging, collapsing, and reforming with movements and shapes that become metaphors for concepts such as conflict, language, and the passage of time.

Shor’s works begin with a conceptual idea that is first expressed as a set of rules governing an abstract animation of patterns, colors, surfaces, and movements. The rules are then implemented as code in a software program that runs on a personal computer in real-time to generate ever-changing moving images. Each of Shor’s images flow into the next, in sequences that are never repeated. Once programmed, these animations become projections onto walls or other preexisting architectural surfaces, or are incorporated into freestanding or wall-mounted sculptural elements. “In my work,” writes Shor, “I think about space as a verb, as an action, as a dynamic process that we are all taking part in. I recreate space by constantly changing it. I do so by injecting real time virtual elements into physical space and physical objects. The raw moments are a synthesis between the code and the territory.”

Related blog post: Rhizome.org