Graham Budgett

It has been reviewed in The Times (London), The Guardian, The Observer, The Face, and Time Out. • Illustration — Graham Budgett, Devil in the Details, Vernacular English and WebGL-based interactive audiovisual (still image), 2014. Critics such as Adrian Searle describe Budgett's earlier photographic images as "tragic dystopias" recalling the social criticism of Walter Benjamin, George Grosz, Jorge Luis Borges, and Wim Wenders; his later work explores the construction of identity, public space and artwork through transitory installations, public projects and digital and code-born new-media that largely function outside the art market. Budgett has been based in Berlin, London and the United States and has taught at University of Westminster and the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is married to artist Jane Mulfinger and lives and works in Santa Barbara.

• Name — Graham Budgett • Born — 1954 • Birthplace — Manchester, United Kingdom • Field — New media art, spatial practices, installation art, photography, sculpture • Education — Stanford University, St. Martin's School of Art, Trent Polytechnic • Style — Interdisciplinary, digital, site-specific • Spouse — Jane Mulfinger • Awards — Microsoft Research Grant, British Council, Artangel Trust • Website — Graham Budgett

Budgett was born in Manchester, United Kingdom in 1954 and studied sculpture at Trent Polytechnic (BA, Fine Arts, 1977) and St. Martin's School of Art (advanced diploma, 1978). He continued his studies at Stanford University in California (MFA, 1981), where his work became more politicized during the era of Reaganism and Thatcherism. After concluding at Stanford, he taught sculpture at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) and produced humorous, politically charged assemblages, whose recontextualized manufactured products played associative games and punctured cultural pretensions. In the mid-1980s, Budgett moved with Jane Mulfinger to Berlin, where both became friends with Edward and Nancy Reddin Kienholz and Budgett received a residency at the Kunstlerhaus Bethanien (1986–7); while there he gained attention for the photomontage work "Berlin bei Nacht" (Berlin by Night). From 1988–94, he lived in London, exhibiting at venues such as The Photographers' Gallery, Watershed Media Centre and Camerawork, and teaching at the University of Westminster and Middlesex University. After moving back to the United States in 1994, Budgett served in several capacities in the Department of Art at UCSB over two decades, including lecturer in New Media and Acting Head of Digital Media Media, before retiring in 2015. He has largely sought to publish and exhibit his later work in public spaces, including the Web, in addition to exhibition venues such as the Trondheim Art Museum, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, and Beaconsfield.

Much of Budgett's post-1995 output is focused on online, often transitory, digital and code-born work. Several projects focus on the human face, as a representation of the psyche and identity or site of human engineering. "Surfacing the Soul: a Visiognomy of Ignominy" (1996) digitally hybridized actual and mediated portraits to examine the media-influenced nature of expressions and critique the notion of portraiture as a "window to the soul"; AURORA (2003) and Imaging the Metahuman (2012) explore applications to iterate composite representations of diversity. In several series, Budgett used probabilistic (as opposed to deterministic) algorithms, which reinterpret object, form and color inputs to create iterative, transitory digital "paintings" and audiovisual works. His "Ideas for Painting" project (2008–13) features series engines based on art-historical abstract-painting influences; they include: Sketches toward a fresh NEO-GEO canvas every 5 seconds for the duration of Western culture (2008); AROTHKOBOT (2013), which generates works reminiscent of Rothko color-field paintings; and way2go (2010), which produces an evolving Op art-like work. • Illustration — Graham Budgett, Weltanschauung: an installed view, installation, 1998, Trondheim Art Museum, Norway. Three visualization engines created in 2012 offer diverse bodies of work: Prosaic Memories of the Space Age produces fractal-like, gray monochrome liminal spatializations; Tossing the Drachma uses mythological pictograms and icons to form unique typographical constellations; and 6turnsout2B9 recodes 3D renderings of well-known architectural structures and cathedrals into idiosyncratic, warped spaces. The interactive audiovisual works an occult dimension (2013) and God, the Devil in the Detail (2014) combine music, psychedelic imagery and commercial animation that viewers can alter with a cursor.

In addition to his image-based work, Budgett has frequently created time and space works that explore public versus private realms and human subjectivity, beginning with large-scale minimal constructions and installations in the late 1970s and continuing four decades into the present. His commissioned temporary public work A Social Outing (1991) reflected on the ordering of public space as "nature" intended for consumption by arranging ninety-one red cedar picnic tables into a 36-foot square by 18-foot pyramid. The inIVA-commissioned installation Grey Area (1995, with Jane Mulfinger) consisted of a boxing ring-sized, memorial-like, grey Plasticine square listing boxing champions; the names were gradually obliterated by the footsteps of visitors, echoing their erosion in public memory over time and offering a stark reminder of the fleeting nature of fame. • Illustration — Jane Mulfinger & Graham Budgett, Regrets (detail), interactive archive, public conceptual artwork, action-research study, 2005–2008. Cambridge, UK, 2005 (left), Paris, France, 2008 (right). Additional stagings in Linz, Austria (2006), Santa Barbara, California (2008). Three site-specific installations reflected on the passing of time, changing architecture and urban-scapes, light, and surveillance by using video projection, sculptural elements and architectural interventions. Weltanschauung (Trondheim Art Museum, 1990) projected panoramic, rotating views of a displaced exterior—not its Norwegian surroundings, but the distant Potsdamer Platz in Berlin—around a space centered by a circular bench and column. Hanbury Terrain (2005, with Mulfinger) explored a single intersection in London's East End, combining projected images of present-day street activity, etchings on glass of historical maps, and a sculptural object representing plans for future displacement. Windauge (Anglo-Saxon for "wind-eye" or "window"; 2016, with Mulfinger) used a small circular window high on a back wall of Beaconsfield Gallery as a camera obscura whose long-neglected view of the surrounding neighborhood was projected onto the floor. In 2005, Budgett and Mulfinger received funding from Microsoft Research Cambridge for the action-research project REGRETS (2005–8), which comprised a public conceptual artwork, interactive archive and study of human regret as a positive entity and tool of self-correction. The street project featured a private kiosk/"confessional" and five roaming custom backpack input/display units with computers that suggested the metaphor of offloading one's burdens (regrets) onto the back of another; they connected to a central database that reciprocated participants with five algorithm-determined, similar regrets in a show of solidarity. REGRETS was staged in Cambridge, Linz, Santa Barbara, and Paris; Circa magazine called it "an intriguing exercise in social psychology" while The Guardian described it as "surprisingly poetic."