I love this type of art. I make digital geometric art, currently complex tilings, at https://andrewwulf.com (not selling any, just showing it). Geometry and math can be very appealing to people although it’s not that popular commercially today outside of NFTs. Repetition and variation can be powerful tools in art. Wacław deserves more recognition.
I enjoyed those, thanks! I like the circular grid eddy type ones the most. I wanted to highlight some favourites but they have a curious phenomenon where, after studying one for a while, looking at a new one is so refreshing that it always ranks higher so I just get stuck in a circle myself!
Also reminds me of Bernard Cohen works that I loved in Tate Modern. For me, he achieves something next level which is to go beyond just pressing my "pleasing geometric pattern" buttons but also the type of order/disorder that feels like a human intelligence at work too.
I can't find a page including the ones I have in mind but:
Thanks to this post and a comment referring Iterated Function System, two polish people are interestingly connected in the field of the subject: Wacław Sierpiński (Sierpiński triangle) [1] and "Wacław Szpakowski", they could even met at the time.
Another interesting thing about such connections is trying to find a mention of them both in the same media (web page, research paper, etc) so thanks to this a very promising book is found "Art, algorithm and ambiguity. Aesthetic ambiguity with regard to metacognition based on visual semiotics, visual rhetoric and Gestalt Psychology" by Axel Rohlfs [2]. This method sometimes works in other fields, if a researcher is aware of a couple obscure facts, names or entities in a field, he or she is usually very good at the field or at least dedicated enough time to it
If you like this sort of thing, there is a whole movement called “Op Art” you should check out[1]. People like Bridget Riley in particular. I saw the big Riley exhibition at the Tate in 2003 and it was fantastic. They had this enormous one-off piece that had been specifically created for this exhibition on the first wall you encountered as you went in. It was basically a massive very bright white wall with a quite spacious grid of 3/4 circles in black. The gap in each circle was rotated as you looked across and up and down the wall. It was such a perculiar optical effect it made your brain hallucinate colours and movement in this purely static, black and white piece.
I knew Bridget Riley’s work a bit before going into the exhibition because she was one of the visual artists you learn about when you study 20C music, and so I had seen a few of these op art pieces, but I never expected an illusion to work so well on such a huge scale.
I saw the major retrospective at the Heywood. Spending a few hours with all the 60s illusion paintings really does do a number on you...
The works that most pleased me most were the later colourful wall paintings like Rajastan (2012). Painting directly on the gallery walls makes for an interesting copyright / art-as-property type question. I guess her team has to repaint them wherever they are shown and must oversee their destruction too. Feels like there could be a Star Trek transporter glitch type issue and whoops, we now have two Rajastan (2012)'s.
Bridget Riley is an absolute master! I saw that exibit too and it actually got me into making generative art (Riley isn't generative art, but there's some obvious similarities).
I always found it fun that she really wasn't happy with how that 3d piece worked out, so went back to flat canvas for the rest of her career. I'm with you though, I thought it was amazing.
These are neat. I'm reminded of Claude Mellan's face of Christ from 1649. This also uses a single continuous line, but he was carving the line by hand into steel!
A goldmine of Logo exercises, where the goal would be to write the shortest program for a given drawing. All of them could be classified by Kolmogorov complexity.
Just wow. You have to take into account the year these were made and its zeitgeist... It took a different mind to come up with those back then ... nice ... well done ... thats the importance of artists .... they are the ice breakers .. the rest just follows ...
I was in NYC around the time this exhibit was put together and was told by a friend to go, referencing this article.
I don’t think I’ve ever connected so strongly with a gallery exhibit as I did for Wacław’s artwork. Something about how intricate the works with just a single line. It was such a serendipitous moment that I won’t soon forget.
In our non-digital past talented creators would be obscure because discovery and distribution was broken. In our digital future talented creators will be obscure because discovery and distribution will be broken.
Rants aside, thats quite a gem to surface here.
Wondering whether for single line drawings there is any analog of aperiodic tillings.
The particles are aluminium. That isn’t ferromagnetic, but its conductivity is good, so you can induce eddy currents in the particles.
That hints at a totally impractical way to do that with regular etch a sketch: put a strong magnet on top of the screen wherever you want the image to be retained and flip over the device.
Where you put magnets, eddy currents will be induced into the aluminium dust. Those will generate a magnetic field that slows down the particles, as they drop towards the screen.
So, if wait just long enough, and flip the device back, you can prevent those particles from reaching the screen.
Problems/challenges:
- “just long enough” will be very tricky to accomplish
- you probably will need very strong magnets
- it will be a challenge to have well-defined regions where your magnet(s) don’t affect the screen
Thanks for that wonderful exploration of the problem space.
Side note on magnets: when our kids were young, I got one of theose stick-and-ball magnetic sets that are capable of making geometric figures. So I made a Archimedian-style polyhedron big enough to be a helmet. I wore it for some minutes on a few occasions and it gave me a very unpleasant (but subtle) headache and a deep, somewhat lasting nausea.
I try not to put magnets near my body anymore, nor allow the kids to. My understanding is that our bodies were evolved over millennia without being near magnets (or electric fields), especially the neodynium sorts.
Anyhow, thanks for the thoughtful reply. It's the best of the internet's potential.
It reminds of the art of M.C.Escher in the sense that it is driven by a mathematical mindset, yet goes beyond mindless repetition. This artist and M.C. Escher would have loved having access to computer drawing program I think.
Whoever scanned these did an excellent job figuring out the settings and grid alignment. All of these images appear to have the lines exactly 4 pixels wide.
