Jonathan McCabe – Instability Landscapes

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Jonathan McCabe’s work specialises in the use of Alan Turing’s reaction diffusion equations to generate rich textural morphologies and dense landscape agglomerations. His recent work combines mutli-scale Turing instability, which generates the well known Turing patterns of spots and stripes, with fluid flow algorithms so that coloured areas predispose themselves to specific kinds flow. The smearing and mixing of patterns at different scales generates hyper saturated recursive colourations and shadows that together form lush expansive, and psychedelic, landscapes.

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That reaction diffusion patterns have been used to model natural forms in the name of algorithmic botany and biology is well noted. McCabe’s coloured compositions extend this kind of simulation into the realms of the poetic fantasy without removing the hard-edged diffusion artefacts. Think of Greg Egan’s artificial life simulator, the Autoverse, or the ‘Garden of Eden’ configuration, both revealed in his pan-computational fiction Permutation City. The latter is an infinitely-expanding, massively complex cellular automaton universe notably based on a fictional, Turing-complete cellular automaton known as TVC (“Turing/Von Neumann/Chiang”). McCabe’s lavas and rivulets fractalize through swirling mountain ranges to melt bifurcating icebergs into activator-inhibitor streams. The end result is refreshingly painterly for a such an overt computational process.

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Monochromatic works, in a similar vein, reveal a deeper connection to the geological world. Self-similar desert topologies coalesce into geometric deposition structures. Stalagmites and stalactites imbue hypogean caves with filigree patterns. Part-bone part-plant systems infiltrate space to create ornamental geopathological lithographies.

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Jonathan McCabe previously at Dataisnature:

Jonathan McCabe – Biological Mandalas
Nervous States & Thunderbolt Pagodas

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Hypogean Wildstyle: Dominik Strzelec’s Byzantine Geology
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aDiatomea – Sonically Superformed Micro-organisms