Islamic Stars
Jim Bumgardner
Artist, teacher, programmer, toymaker
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The monadic manner of unfolding insists on the relationship between infinite and image. It emphasizes that not only do images unfold from the infinite, but also that the infinite is enfolded in every image.
Move the mouse horizontally and vertically to change the image. Y controls the distance from the center of the polygon edge, X controls angle. This was an experiment with a method used to produce Arabic/Islamic star tiling patterns. Starting with an underlying grid of polygons, the star pattern is produced by drawing lines from two equidistant points on each polygon edge at some fixed angle (controlled by the mouse). At the point where the lines would intersect with other lines, they are clipped. I'm using something called "Hankin's method" to generate the star patterns.
Hankin’s method, also known as “polygons-in-contact,” is a way of describing the star tiling patterns of Islamic art (see his original paper on the subject, “The Drawing of Geometric Patterns in Saracenic Art”). By displaying it so intuitively, with controls that encourage play, Baumgardner creates an image where every point is active, and reflected in every other, and the whole flourishes with a complexity that gestures, as does the legacy of tiling patterns, to the infinite, the space of endlessly repeating shapes or all possible shapes.
“This life springing from within the minimal part, like a plant from a seed, suggests the coming into being of a world that is unfathomable on a different order of unfathomability: not the extensive universe of the infinite, but the intensive universe of the infinitesimal.” (p. 255)
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