Human Robots & Space-Filling Emotions

Invader Fractal- Jared Tarbell

David Szafranski makes paintings of a procedural nature recalling the textures and patterns of nature, more specifically cell biology and the rhizomatic mappings of plant growth. The painting Human_robot, for example, has a kind of root system with space-filling properties and the title implies the kind of robotic repetitive action which would be required to make such a work. It’s the human equivalent of a Diffusion Aggregation Limitation system – whereby particles in solution diffuse randomly until they move near to a piece of solid structure, at which point they come out of solution and form part of the aggregate resulting in dendritic structures. All of the works have a similar quality and evoke the idea of the human-computer in repetitive sub-routines crystallizing the work into existence.

Kuja rightly points out the connection between Captain_Freedom and the cellular oscillations of Eden, a large-scale installation piece by John McCormack dealing with a computational ecology currently on view at Art.ficial 3.0 (See previous post).

Messenger sees the human computer map out the surface of a cell-colony with degrees of order and randomness.

All of the works display space-filling properties -a side effect of the adventures of growth in natural systems. There are a whole family of space-filling curves in Math, including the Dragon and Hilbert Curve’s both of which are derived from L-system expansion. Compare again Szafranski’s Captain_Freedom and iterations of the Dragon curve to see the computed connectedness.

Space-fill is literally taken to another dimension with Daniel Erdely’s Spidron System, where alternating sequences of isosceles triangles applied to polyhedra in a particular folded arrangement exhibit specific spatial properties – an exotic 3d space-fill.

‘The Emotion Fractal is a recursive space filling algorithm using English words describing the human condition.’ Jared Tarbell’s piece nicely combines an element of narrative using a predefined set of English words with a recursive sub-divisioning process, and as he say’s ‘Continual variations on this theme took me to some weird places’ as the ‘Emotion Fractal tells a winding tale of human experience personal to each observer’. See also his ‘Invader Fractal’.

Click here for another article on procedural/process art