Media Arts and Technologies Professor Shows New Algorithmic Art | Nearby News
It was an earworm that lasted 4 dozen years, but it wasn’t a jingle, it was an algorithm. An equation George Legrady came across in 1986 in Scientific American has captured his imagination once more and once more ever because.
In 2021, he returned to it as soon as a lot more to make “Phantom Waves,” a series of photos exploring the intersection of digital photography and math, now on view in the California Nanosystems Institute on the second floor of Elings Hall at UC Santa Barbara.
George Legrady’s ‘Phantom Waves,’ 2021. (George Legrady) Credit: George Legrady
George Legrady’s ‘Phantom Waves,’ 2021. (George Legrady) Credit: George Legrady“Every as soon as in a whilst, I come back to this, how to use math equations to make aesthetically fascinating final results,” mentioned Legrady, distinguished professor of media art and technologies.
“The minute you digitize a photograph, it is definitely not a photograph any longer it is just a string of numbers,” Legrady mentioned. “The other factor about digitality is you can move information from a single domain to yet another. You can turn information into a sound or an image since it is just numbers.”
Published in the report “Computer Recreations” by A.K. Dewdney, the algorithm in Scientific American that inspired Legrady employs frequency modulation. In physics, it is signal processing but for Legrady, it is an aesthetic device.
Writing in C language on an IBM individual computer system, his experimentation in the 1980s brought new types of photographic visualization. Some of it was produced probable by technological developments such as the Truevision Targa analog-to-digital graphics board, which was the initial to permit artists to manipulate photographs with code.
Each six or so years because, Legrady has returned to this algorithm to see what he can do with the most current technologies.
His new operate utilizes the 1986 equation along with custom application, capturing in nonetheless photos the oscillations of a variety of frequencies that modulate each and every other, developing complicated patterns.
The algorithm operates by developing the frequency modulation: A sinewave frequency with a worth is sent from left to proper. At the similar time, yet another sinewave with a unique frequency worth is sent from prime to bottom.
The two waves intersect at each and every pixel developing numeric values, resulting in harmonics, several occasions outdoors of the 0–255 colour variety from black to white. Legrady explained that he then “recycles the out of bounds values to get unique final results.”
“The patterns emerge via phantom frequencies generated when the signal goes beyond the tonal variety of person pixels,” Legrady mentioned.
“This series brings interest to the nature of the digital photograph as fundamentally a sequence of numbers that can be manipulated mathematically to outcome in photos that do not exist in the planet but are developed algorithmically,” he mentioned.
“The series is a project in generative art, an iterative human-application collaboration exactly where the artist selects numeric parameters by which the application generates tonal values for each and every pixel inside the two-dimensional image space,” he mentioned.
In component, Legrady was inspired by the electronic music compositions of Iannis Xenakis and other 20th century composers. “Phantom Wave” photos are visual expressions resulting from tweaking oscillating frequencies applied to pixels inside a two-dimensional matrix space.
The objective, Legrady explained, was “to arrive at photos that could not have been realized without having computation and mathematical modeling.”
Generating symmetrical and monochromatic strings of pixels and patterns, Legrady’s “Phantom Waves” photos discover digital photography via the lens of mathematical equations.
“Why do we think in the photograph when it is a constructed image? It is not a correct image,” mentioned Legrady, who also directs UCSB’s Experimental Visualization Lab. “With digital technologies it is entirely manipulated and processed.”
The current operates have been inspired by experimentation Legrady undertook in his spare time more than COVID-19. He also noted that in the years in between 2000 and 2016 he was functioning with collaborators on complicated information collection and evaluation.
Then, in 2020, he had an art installation canceled in Beijing since of the pandemic (it is now been rescheduled to open at the Shenzhen Museum of Modern Art in April).
For the duration of quarantine, he mentioned, he was “just sitting right here in my studio by myself.” He started to revisit projects that he could promptly do on his personal. “I was experimenting with sending sine waves left to proper or prime to bottom. The waves imply that each and every pixel receives a signal, and it creates harmonics.”
As an analogy, Legrady likened how the algorithm operates to creating sounds on a guitar string with your finger. If you push the string down and play it, you get a sound. But if you just touch the string, you get harmonics.
The photos depict exactly where the waves meet at each and every pixel — and via this procedure, Legrady can make values that are beyond the tonal variety of the photographic image.
“Frequency modulation is a basic element of electronic music composition as practiced by my Media Arts & Technologies colleagues Curtis Roads, JoAnn Kuchera-Morin, director of the Allosphere, and lecturer Karl Yerkes,” Legrady mentioned. “I’m interested in the sort of photos I can make.”
Legrady received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2016. His artworks are in the collection of the San Francisco Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Canada, the Centre Pompidou Museum, Paris, the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the Musée d’art Contemporain in Montreal, the Philbrook Museum of Art, the Smithsonian Institution, 21c Museum and other people.
He has realized a quantity of permanent public commissions such as “Kinetic Flow,” a massive 18’ x 22’ abstract image of a sinewave modulated by subway demographic information at the Santa Monica/Vermont Los Angeles Metro Rail (2007). He also has made public installations for the Corporate Executive Board (Arlington 2009) and the Seattle Central Library (2005–present) — a information visualization installation that may well be the longest operating project of its sort to-date.
UCSB has been house to other pioneering algorithmic artists, which includes media arts and technologies professors Marcos Novak and Marko Peljhan and Jean-Pierre Hebert, former longtime artist-in-residence of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, whose operate is at present exhibited at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) in the show Coded: Art Enters the Personal computer Age.
