Technique · Fields
Order to chaos
A sheet of outlined shapes, perfectly regular at the top and increasingly scattered toward the bottom.
Order to chaos is a field drawn for every pixel by the graphics chip. Every piece on Synapse Drip is made from a recipe that layers techniques like this one, and you can change any of it in the Studio.
Good to know
- Georg Nees's Schotter, "gravel", made in 1968, is a grid of squares that tilt and drift more and more down the sheet: this plate follows the same idea.
- 1965 saw the first public exhibitions of computer-generated art, in Stuttgart and in New York.
- Vera Molnar began making computer drawings in 1968, exploring what she called systematic disorder: a small, controlled amount of chance in a regular structure.
- Her "(Des)Ordres" series of squares, from the 1970s, is the ancestor of this plate.
The mathematics
- Each of the 17 rows gets a bigger share of chance than the one above; the chance for every shape comes from a hash of its row and column, so the same plate comes out on every device.
- A square turned by a quarter turn, about 1.57 radians, looks the same as one that was never turned, so past that point a bigger rotation adds no more disorder.
In art
- In 1960 Francois Morellet made a picture of 40,000 squares whose colours were decided by the even and odd digits of a telephone book.
- Concrete and Op artists of the 1950s and 1960s built pictures from simple rules and let the rule do the composing.
More ways to use it
Related techniques
Nebula and stars · Liquid · Droplets · Network · Terrain and maps · Neuron · Fractal tree · Radiolarian shell