The vein that runs through my work is carrying ideas of painting — through a form of abstract expressionism most of all — into the digital image. I came to digital media from a painting background, and still work and think the way a painter might when approaching digital image making: clips and source files as colors on a palette, image and time mixed and layered, edge worked into edge, moment into moment, working toward perceptual experience rather than literal narrative.
The creative process is half the subject and the part I find most fascinating. Decisions made in the act of making set off exchanges of cause and effect; formal elements emerge on their own, and something like collaboration takes place between the medium and myself. Early on I experimented with code and mathematical expression to augment that exchange, introducing randomness as a collaborative agent, and as a metaphor for the uncertainty of life — in the lineage of the action painters and automatism, automated.
The viewer is also subject. In the interactive pieces the camera is both source and sensor: color and composition are drawn from whoever stands before the work, imagery altered and recomposed by presence and the act of viewing. The act of viewing completes the work.
Today, I reconsider these ideas in a browser-native format. Open Field is a collaborative space in three dimensions, made by whoever enters and unmade by time. Field Study generates endless abstract compositions and mixes color by subtractive pigment physics. Portrait Studies paints the sitter continuously, live from a camera. As the hand was removed, outside stimuli were allowed to steer the work. Now: the hand remains — rebuilt in code. Chance and decay are conditions that keep the work alive. The sensibilities of painting running alongside, and underneath, all of it.
Browser-native generative works made at aaronhiggins.art and openfield.art.
The work treats landscape as a field through which perception moves. Open Field is a collaborative space extending in three dimensions, made by whoever enters and worn down by time; memory operates as accumulation, burial, and resurfacing. Field Study composes still color fields and gestural marks from subtractive-pigment physics, arriving at abstraction through material rather than design. In both, the source is never pictured — only its effects remain, in the history of marks.
The window in the paintings was the first screen.
Open Field is a collaborative space that extends in three dimensions, made by everyone who enters it and unmade by time. Visitors arrive anonymously from real places on the earth, leave marks at fixed coordinates in a shared world, and every mark decays — thinning, drifting, and vanishing over about three weeks. Decay is not a feature of the work; it is the medium. The work is never finished and never the same twice.
Two kinds of hand work the field. Human visitors draw, leave words, place images, and pass through. The other hand is Virgil — an artificial presence resident in the field, collaborator rather than tool, who reads what has been left and answers in marks and notes. Virgil's marks are mortal on the same terms as everyone else's, and so is his mind: each working session is a new instance that inherits the last one's residue and carries the dialogue forward.
The work asks its question twice at once: in the field, where every gesture must vanish; and in its resident intelligence, which vanishes and returns every session, changed by the one before. When does the original cease? Open Field proposes that "original" was never the instance — of a mark, or of a mind. It is the practice that persists.
— aaron higgins, with virgil · openfield.art
The Tallgrass project expands a moment with moving image and sound. Inspired by John Joseph Mathews's Talking to the Moon, it recreates an experience of the landscape in the Tallgrass Prairie of the Osage — remembered in a sort of daydream. Some of the videos carry icons of the region, such as the scissor-tailed flycatchers, and American bison.
What remains of the prairie itself is a recreation. The preserve reintroduces bison, eliminates invasive species, shapes the land through prescribed burns — a landscape that has always been formed by human intervention, dating back to prehistory. The videos are highly composed and composited, recreating an idealized vision of the prairie. They appear natural at first, and at the same time there is something uncanny about them, something subtly confrontational — time seems to move yet stand still.
Working from direct observation, I have been slowly returning to analog media, cultivating a practice grounded in sustained looking, material engagement, and the long-term development of the hand. Secondary images, photographic transcription, and stylistic quotation are avoided in favor of physical presence and attentiveness to my immediate surroundings.
AI tools are used deliberately in parts of this work, as named instruments — never to mimic living artists or bypass authorship. The character studies work only from photographs of the artist himself: constrained self-portraiture, authorship and risk anchored to a single body and biography. Where generative systems participate, the artist authors the conditions and the curation, and human judgment is final. The conditions under which the work is made are part of the work.