complexity

Lots happening here. This one got a “wow” out loud when it popped up on screen.

Detail on the right.

An adjustment to the glyphs below. I removed the variable stroke thickness and substituted a hairline rule for each glyph regardless of the grid scale. This makes these neat felt-fabric-looking compositions. Once again, it teeters on the brink of chaos, but one can make out the relationships between the shapes of individual colors.

While working at my day job, I listen to 75% talk/25% music on the headphones. During the day I usually just have WNYC on, but lately I’ve been subscribing to more and more podcasts. A recent treasure trove is this lecture series from the Long Now Foundation. Will Wright & Brian Eno’s talk on the overlap between generative art and generative game design is a gem.

Also, don’t miss the beautiful prototype of the 10,000 Year Clock by Danny Hillis when you’re there.

One recent addition to the stable has been a four-point glyph. For each mark on the grid, a closed loop of four lines (bezier curves, actually) is placed. The curves curve the way they do based on color variables so similar colors produce similar glyphs. For some pieces, I’ve let the glyph retain the color information, and in others, I’ve made them all the same stroke weight and gray in color, so that the glyph is divorced from the color that produced it. This makes some nice, alien alphabets, daring one to read meaning (or at least intent) into them. Layering multiple grids of the gray ones with a slight opacity shift reads like pencil lines.

I’ve had a book of art by patients at a 19th century German insane asylum (a gift from a friend) by my desk for the last couple of weeks, and the frenetic, obsessive nature of these lines reminded me of Emma Hauck’s terrifyingly sad scrawls. Or, more recently and less insane, perhaps certain Cy Twomblys.

At the colorized end of things, the glyph-maker worked best with a severely oversized grid (that is, each glyph overlapping a lot with its neighbor). This one looks chaotic from a distance, but in the detail view there’s an obsessive regularity that invites curiosity.

From the aforementioned Prospect Park images.

detail of last image above:

Lots of new stuff coming. Reworked the “lines” and “s-bends” from a couple of weeks ago to do full 360-degree rotations, and it made a most satisfying difference. Also, Deb and I took a walk in Prospect Park on the really really warm Saturday at dusk, and I filled a flashcard with long-exposure images that made for quite nice picture-fuel. Will post some of the choicest results soon.