Bill Jones has been making cameraless photography for a number of years using black ink blots as negatives.  As part of his process, he tries to force these accidental ink blots into recognizable shapes.  He makes them randomly until an image appears, then tries to repeat it.  One of these conjured sets of images appears to be a rather realistic looking human heart, as in the photographic print Untitled, 1998.  Jones mapped this heart image onto a wire frame in a CAD program (Untitled CAD Drawing, 1998), and then had it output as a 3D print ( Untitled, 1998, Zcorp Zprint).  He  painted the sculpture red to make it appear more visceral.  “In this way,” he writes, “I make the perception of the ink blot a reality as an object that is truly heart-like in shape and size.”  The photographic realization of the accidental image and the sculptural object from the same blot reflect each other's dimensionality.

Bill Jones is an artist and editor of ArtByte magazine. (M>M)