Art News New Zealand, Winter 2022. Review of Simon Ingram with Terrestrial Assemblages: Machine in the Garden, Whangārei Art Museum, 18 December 2021–4 May 2022.
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In the past, artists have often been characterised as creative-genius types, impressing themselves on the world rather than being impressed by it. But Auckland painter–producer Simon Ingram rejects this attitude. Decentring and dethroning ‘the artist’, he generates his abstract paintings not spontaneously, not intuitively, but via algorithms. Whether he executes them by hand (as with his Automata Paintings) or delegates the task to programmed machines (as with his Radio Paintings), their compositions exceed his ultimate control. Ingram’s elegantly installed show Machine in the Garden places his Automata Paintings (2004–8) and related Powder Games gouaches (2021) into conversation with his Tree Models (2021)—one of the new computer works he’s been producing with artist-programmer-environmentalist John-Paul Pochin under the moniker Terrestrial Assemblages.

The  Automata Paintings  are based on ‘cellular automata’—mathematical grid models in which the states of cells change through repeatedly applying a basic rule. While grounded in simplicity, cellular automata generate fascinating forms of emerging behaviour. A famous example, Langton’s Ant, for instance, produces seemingly chaotic patterns until it suddenly starts to form a ‘highway’. Ingram’s Automata Paintings are like snapshots of developing cellular automata. Although he can’t previsualise their compositions, he can influence their look, by the way he establishes the initial rules (and the number of ‘moves’) and by setting other aesthetic parameters (like size, medium, palette, and manner of execution). Looking like classic modernist paintings, they have an undeniable visual appeal, even before we learn how they were done.

For Tree Models, three ‘unboxed’ computers in Perspex cases are linked to a potted tītoki tree in the centre of the gallery. Sensors on the tree feed data—concerning light, air pressure, sap flow, soil moisture, and temperature—into the computers. Using cellular automata-like rules, they are programmed to imagine a living tree—partly informed by data from the actual tree—in real time. On the three screens, the imagined tree is rendered in different aspects in a variety of blocky schematics. Tree Models combines elements of Ingram’s Automata Paintings (defined by a closed mathematical system) and his Radio Paintings (made by machines responding to external real-world inputs). It adds an ethical twist to his project, giving it new relevance in our climate-change-concern moment. Here—with Ingram operating as part of an assemblage of nature, technology, and the human—his longstanding approach of decentring the artist plugs into a new political imperative to not lord over nature, to promote more-than-human ecological perspectives. Nerd becomes tree hugger.

Ingram reveals and conceals. His works are exemplary, but not explanatory. The Automata Paintings don’t betray their underlying rules. And, even with Tree Models, where we witness the metamorphosis, there’s too much going on to fully clock what’s happening. Instead, we are transfixed by the work’s aesthetic, appreciating the beauty of trees via the beauty of computer modelling. Tree Models transcends being a maths-science demonstration to become a meditative ‘art’ experience, fudging distinctions between nature and art, chaos and order, the real and the ideal, the ghost and the machine. 
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[IMAGE: Simon Ingram with Terrestrial Assemblages Tree Models 2021]