Fakewhale Gallery Presents cornell_Box by Andy Duboc on Verse

On April 16th, 2025, Fakewhale presents “cornell_Box,” a Fakewhale Gallery generative art release by Andy Duboc on Verse.

Developed in custom Javascript and WebGL, cornell_Box reframes the screen as a site of spatial inquiry through abstract, real-time animations. Drawing from a lineage of light-based practice including Leo Villareal’s systemic logic, James Turrell’s chromatic immersion, and Sean Hogan’s generative elegance, Duboc transposes their physical strategies into computational language. Within a simulated reflective environment, emissive lines shift gradually in color, activating a layered architecture of light and space that unfolds in real time. The result is technically precise, conceptually grounded, and restrained in visual language, yet expansive in perceptual depth.

The browser becomes performative, the code spatial. Duboc doesn’t simulate space, he generates it, reprogramming light as both structure and sensation.

Code as Light: Andy Duboc and the Reprogramming of Perception

Andy Duboc’s cornell_Box emerges as a profound continuation of light-based spatial practices developed by seminal artists across the last five decades. While firmly rooted in software aesthetics, the series draws upon the structural rigor of Leo Villareal, the perceptual immersion of James Turrell, and the generative elegance of Sean Hogan. Rather than referencing them superficially, Duboc engages their methodologies, transposing their physical strategies into computational language. This thread traces the formal and conceptual connections between cornell_Box and its artistic ancestry.

These abstract real-time animations, built through custom software in Javascript and WebGL, unfold as sequences of emissive lines whose chromatic flow redefines the digital canvas as a site of embodied perception. The simulated room in which these lines pulse is not a passive container but a dynamic environment that reflects, distorts, and transforms the emitted light. Duboc’s work revives and reconfigures the tradition of artists who have used light not merely as subject or medium but as a spatial and cognitive architecture.

The influence of Leo Villareal is evident in Duboc’s systemic approach to animation. Villareal’s use of algorithmic structures to control LEDs, creating generative sequences that shift rhythmically over time, established a vocabulary in which repetition, variation, and modulation are central. Duboc internalizes this logic but expands it into a fully virtual realm where the behaviors of light are simulated rather than physically enacted. By encoding perceptual sequences through WebGL, Duboc renders time not as duration but as structural transformation. The browser becomes a performative site. The code is no longer backstage. It is visible, spatial, experiential.

James Turrell’s legacy permeates cornell_Box through its commitment to immersive stillness and chromatic depth. Turrell’s environments manipulate the viewer’s ocular mechanics by dissolving the contours of architecture into pure atmospheric color. Duboc invokes this strategy in digital terms, where the spatial dissolution is executed through shaders and procedural light mapping. His virtual room is not bound by gravity or material but constructs a perceptual envelope entirely through computational control. The silent animation becomes an active space in which presence is recalibrated and attention is heightened. Like Turrell, Duboc does not depict light. He composes with perception.

Sean Hogan’s influence enters through the structural elegance of Duboc’s line systems. Hogan’s work explores generative complexity through minimal visual means, relying on recursive forms and the accumulation of iterative motion. Duboc amplifies this by introducing chromatic flux and architectural reflection. His animated lines are not merely aesthetic gestures but data-driven agents. Their behavior is determined by code, yet their output suggests affect and intention. This blurs the boundary between authored composition and emergent form. In Duboc’s animations, generative logic meets the dramaturgy of light. He extends Hogan’s field into a scenography of encoded depth.

The technical framework of cornell_Box is crucial to its conceptual weight. Built in Javascript and rendered through WebGL with display-P3 color spaces, these works operate at the threshold of real-time graphics and artistic abstraction. The GPU is not incidental. It is the generative engine, the hidden actor that computes light in motion. In this sense, Duboc engages in a form of procedural minimalism, where code is used not to imitate reality but to construct an autonomous visual grammar. The viewer does not witness a pre-rendered animation. They experience a living algorithm. This places Duboc’s work in dialogue not only with light artists but with the history of software-based aesthetics as a critical practice.

Duboc’s cornell_Box series does not reference the past as a nostalgic archive. It activates a lineage. Villareal, Turrell, and Hogan each contributed to the formation of a visual language where light behaves as structure, meaning, and experience. Duboc translates that language into code, recomposing their insights within a virtual topology. His rooms of reflection are not simulations of space but spatial propositions born from software. In them, light is unbound from its material constraints. It circulates as information, sensation, and event. Duboc does not merely emulate his influences. He reprograms them. Through this process, cornell_Box positions itself as both homage and progression, mapping the continuity of light-based practice across media, generations, and machines.

cornell_Box is not an artwork to be watched but a space to be entered.
Its references are architectural, procedural, ancestral.

It does not simulate light, it thinks in it.