Algorithmic worlds

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2010-02-13 Anthony Gormley

2010-02-06 Dampened pattern deco

2010-02-05 Robert Horvitz

2010-01-30 Aperiodic tilings

2010-01-23 Artificial diatoms

2010-01-17 Enumerating crosswords

2010-01-16 Series and animations

2010-01-15 Pasternak

2010-01-09 Drop art

2010-01-08 Five self-portraits

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A blog about algorithmic art and fractal aesthetic. Subscribe to the RSS feed.

January 8th 2010

Five self-portraits

First I uploaded another animation, based on 20091112-1. Scroll down on this page.

I stumbled upon "The power of self", an image competition calling for self-portraits. Of course, self-portraits are not the usual lot for abstract algorithmic artists, but I had already tried my hand at it with 20081020, which uses shuffled slices of a photograph as basic pattern to be piled. I've never been really satisfied with this image, so I decided to come back to this technique and see if anything interesting comes out. Here are five self-portraits. To keep some unity, I decided to use a single photograph and restrict the palette to black and white. The photograph is used to decorated a regular square tiling, in order to produce a basic pattern covering the plane. It would be of course interesting to use other tilings, but until now I have been lazy debugging the code...

20100101

In 20100101, the photograph is decomposed into 64x64 pixels. Moreover, the magnification step is 8. Therefore, the pictures of the third pattern to be piled fit exactly into the pixels of the first pattern (because 8x8=64). Similarly, the pixels of the second copy of the pattern contain the pictures of the fourth one, etc...

20100102

Here, the tiles of a Truchet pattern are chosen accordint to the brightness of the photograph. The Truchet patterns are rescaled and piled, but not the underlying photograph which determines the Truchet pattern. As a result, the photograph is approximated by successive Truchet patterns: roughly by the large scale ones, finely by the small scale ones. All the shapes you see are created by the Truchet patterns.

20100103

Here some twists are applied to the photograph which effectively amounts to increasing its contrast so that it is mainly black or white. The piling happens to be such that the hairs of a copy of the pattern provide a mustache to the immediately larger copy.

20100104

Maybe my favorite. Again the basic pattern is a photograph of me, tiled on a square tiling, but before proceeding to the piling, I mixed this pattern with Perlin noise. I use this technique frequently in my abstract works, because it allows to break the monotony of a simple pattern. Here it deform the faces in a subtle and strange way to produce a pretty scary result.

20100105

This work uses roughly the same technique as 20100102, but with a smooth pattern.

It seems that mixing photographs and algorithms yield interesting possibilities. For sure it was fun to slaughter my face.