Birch Cooper Floating World Nesting Vessels contains a collection of Birch Cooper’s digital sculptures made around Portland, Oregon from March 2020 to March 2022. These sculptures were generated with a combination of algorithmic procedure and intuitive shaping. Their recursive structures are at once biological and architectural, human and non-human, occupying a virtual space outside of scale and materiality, where simplicity and complexity become difficult to differentiate. Although totally synthetic, these scenes reflect reality as it relates to human experience, recalling states of dilated consciousness, confusion or extreme clarity. This volume offers a zoom through these structures, unimpeded by narrative, language and directionality. The virtual forms have been frozen in two dimensional space through digital printing onto 160 full color pages. Birch Cooper’s work remains open to various tools, approaches and substrates, but almost always involves electronic media. He is a frequent collaborator, particularly in his collective MSHR, together with Brenna Murphy. He maintains designing live electronic music systems for performance and installation as a central node of focus. His digital sculpture is a byproduct of collaboration and electronic music, but it is enacted alone and with no linear correlation to sound. Sculpting inside a computer is a place of refuge that exists outside of reason. Cooper views his art practice as a high complexity feedback loop- a living organism that needs constant attention. He lives nomadically with MSHR and considers Portland his spiritual base.
