Rational Relationships

Collision Test
Kim Asendorf / German Artist and Designer / Moves between Free Art and New Media Art
kaubonschen.com / kimasendorf.de
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This manner of unfolding is rational, privileging the way image arises from information and information from the infinite. The rhythm of unfolding is measured and clear.
    Artworks that reveal their algorithmic construction indicate that the relationships between image, information, and infinite can be known rationally. When the algorithm is carried out, what is latent becomes manifest, for example as a proliferation of pattern or a musical sequence. A sense of unity and well-being rewards the contemplation of geometric harmonies. This manner of unfolding typifies Islamic geometrical architecture, as well as new media artworks that foreground the algorithmic process.

This is an experimental Sketch started with the idea to create something like a dynamic network. At first I wrote a class to get "Points" on a random position, direction and speed. To simulate a communication or an interaction between the Points I simply used the method dist(). If the distance falls, for example under 100, the two Points get connected by a line. The stroke weight rises by falling distance. The last step was the collision itself. If the distance falls under the radius of the Point the direction and the speed reset.

A movement that plays across the screen, lively and vivid and clearly the expression of a rational process being carried out. Points associate and dissociate, lines reflect proximity, and the resulting collision-driven structure moves, bounces, tangles and flexes. There is a deep pleasure simply in seeing a complex plan carried out into simplicity, the pleasure of the unfolding whose every stage is apparent to us.

“The quality of elegance in an equation consists in the vast amount of calculation that is invisible, yet implicit, in the final formulation. Elegance is an index of logical depth; a mathematician who knows the codes can appreciate the skill with which they are concealed.” (p. 167)

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