Untiled Faces

Posted on Mar 23, 2011 in Faces of Chaos

Untiled Faces is an interactive sculpture that mixes a chaotic dynamical system with its “meta” representation, allowing the viewer to explore the somewhat unpredictable four-dimensional parameter space by moving a series of levers.

Untiled Faces by Nathan Selikoff. 13 1/2″ x 15 3/4″ x 20″. Interactive Sculpture. 2011.

Untiled Faces (detail)

This work builds off both my Aesthetic Explorations and my Faces of Chaos series. With the former, I am exploring individual strange attractors—each image encodes four specific parameters. With the latter, I am exploring the space of all possibilities, and each image encodes a range of parameters in a “meta” view of the system.

Untiled Faces (detail)

Untiled Faces

The left-most pane of Untiled Faces shows a small representation of another artwork, Tiled Faces, with a small red square over one image of this 32×32 grid. As the left lever is moved, the red square moves, updating the x and y position, and simultaneously updating both the center and right-most panes.

The right pane shows the image from the left pane, zoomed in. The right-most lever moves a small red target within this image, updating another x and y position, and simultaneously updating the center pane.

Untiled Faces (detail)

The center pane shows a chaotic attractor, whose four coefficients are taken from the positions of the left and right levers. The center lever adjusts the virtual camera that is viewing this strange attractor.

Thus, all three images are linked, and in a somewhat mysterious way, show the relationship between a strange attractor and its Lyapunov exponent.