Complexes

Recursive Yin Yang 4 by ~ hawmkoonstormbringer on deviant ART The basic construction of a yin-yang symbol is to take a circle and two circles of half the radius, sitting along one axis. I used this substitution recursively with a 90 deg. rotation: For the smaller circles, add two more circles of half their radius (one fourth of the original circle). Continue substituting, and you end up with this figure. The interesting thing is that not only the surfaces are fractal, but also the line separating the two colors. The figure can carry several messages, apart from those of yin yang: e.g. there is also struggle, balance, and interaction at different scales. This work is dedicated to our friend and compadre Dr. Igor Lugo, who recently defended his PhD.

The impressive opening ceremony of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games exploited considerably the concept of self-organization in a very artistic fashion. To start the ceremony, 2008 drummers entered the stadium. Their drums and sticks had lights, so when the lights went out, beautiful patterns were formed. Then a countdown started (to 2008/08/08, 8:08 pm), and huge numbers were traveling through the drummers across the field in perfect synchronization: 60, 50, 40, 30, 20, 10. Then the last seconds were very quickly displayed with arabic and chinese numbers. Later, in the middle of the field a huge movable-type printer started generating beautiful waves and dynamic patterns, including the kanji for harmony. Which technology did they use for such an amazing and coordinated display? Well, humans, of course... Another amazing performance was given by 2008 tai chi masters. They were generating circles and spirals and moving all around in a perfectly coordinated fashion. How did they achieve al...

Following the Fractal Tessellation inspired by the Alhambra, I made a few more: here's one with octagons, and another with curved triangles...

I designed this pattern for a T-shirt of the New England Complex Systems Institute . I took the NECSI logo, which represents five "people working together". Then I overlayed different sizes of it over patterns of a Penrose tiling, which is a tesselation with five-fold symmetry. In other words, it fills the space without repeating itself. Since the logo appears of different sizes, I see this pattern as "people working together at different scales". You can find a high resolution PDF here.

A couple of years ago, while living in Granada, I got inspired by the Moorish patterns at the Alhambra. Playing around with Inkscape , I came up with the idea of a Sierpiński -style fractal that would be more interesting and also tileable. Only recently I put several tiles together, and I was amazed to see that there were more and more patterns emerging as tiles interacted... I can spend hours finding patterns in this image... I should get these tiles for my bathroom... You can find a high resolution PDF here.

Mauro told us about DevantArt . It is a website where users can upload their own art to share, choosing which type of license they'll have. It is becoming easier and easier to produce and distribute content generated by anybody. The only problem now is to navigate through the more than 50 million "deviations" that have been uploaded since 2000... I already uploaded some of my own here... (much more on my homepage... ) This is one of the main features of Web 2.0, where any user can generate content, e.g. Wikipedia , Flickr , Blogger , etc. A nice follow-up from the Open Source movement. Where will it continue? Already people are moving to provide Open Access to science and all types of knowledge... Knowledge is power! Knowledge to the people!

Last weekend, Nadia and I went to the Symposium "Where do we go from here?", to celebrate the launch of the Brussels Platform for the Arts . With all the educational reforms going around the European Union, Belgium decided that it was time for an academic Doctorate in the Arts. For some people involved in the event, academics = science, and they defended that they had nothing to do with each other, arguing that science is cold and methodical, and that it suffocates creativity. Other people, such as Jean Paul Van Bendegem (well, actually the ones who have a hands-on experience with science), defended that there are more things in common than differences between the arts and sciences. I think that both need creativity and hard work. Nobody in science really follows the scientific method: you need inspiration to explore new avenues and ideas. And art is not only about liberating the spirit: without hard work, you won't do anything relevant. Sciences, not even the hardest on...

Here in Brussels they recently renovated the Atomium, a relic from the 1958 World Expo. It's quite nice, shinny and with lights at night... it seems I should take a tripod the next time... 

Following Nadia 's steps and advice, I've been making some "artistic" pictures, some of them you can find here .

After more than two years of being "too busy", I finally did another painting... "Everybody's Hive" Carlos Gershenson 2006. Acrylic on canvas, 65x80 cm. Merelo Guervós collection. Mathematical explanation : This painting uses ideas of self-organization . Even when the tiling is periodic, the colouring patter isn't. I used local rules to determine which of the five colours to use in each tile, leading to an irregular, yet not random, colouring pattern. Each new tile to be coloured has a colour chosen randomly, constrained by the colours of its neighbours, not to have two tiles of the same colour touching each other. Since the minimum number of colours that could be used is four (leading to a regular colouring), adding a fifth colour allows nonperiodicity, yet constraining the choice of colours that result in local regularities. I say that the colouring is self-organizing because it would not be possible to determine the pattern globally, i.e. without actually...