Tech Notes

Every finished piece that is run through the printer or sees time onscreen is the result of a long chain of development, much of it unplanned. And that process is important to me as an artist – sometimes more important than the finished work itself. In preparation for Process & Influence, my first solo exhibition (documented here), I tried to think of a good way to convey a bit of the creative and technical process that underlies a lot of [Read More...]

I like to visualize strange attractors in real time, and OpenCL is a promising technology to take this to the next level, as it can utilize all processing cores available on a system, be they GPU, CPU, or a combination. As long as the algorithm can be made massively parallel.

The original OpenGL program was crafted to simulate a population controlled by finite state machines, using stickmen and stickwomen with simple animations to visually represent the unfolding dynamics of the population. Later, the program was changed to experiment with the idea of digital chronophotography, or a way to capture in one frame the essence of each particular simulated run.

Custom software was developed to calculate the Lyapunov exponent of a chaotic dynamical system over a range of its four parameters. The raw data from this 4-dimensional parameter space was fed to another program to generate thousands of individual images, where X and Y represent two of the four coefficients. Every single pixel in these images gets its value from the calculation of the Lyapunov exponent of the strange attractor generated by the four coefficients it represents.