March 3, 2014

I have changed the direction of my project a little bit. I am not completely abandoning the 3D concept - it will be worked into the collection - but I am giving it a rest for a few days.

I have decided that I would like to make a series of fabric designs that center around mathematics and programming, specifically focusing on the ways recursion and other math/programming concepts can become beautiful. I am creating most of the designs in Processing, an IDE designed for visual artists that runs on the Java Virtual Machine.

The Cantor set is a good place to start with recursion. I wrote a program in Processing that produced the following visualization of the Cantor set:

I then took this image into Adobe Illustrator and applied a texture to it (done in Corel Painter). Here is the result:

I think this makes a great border design. It also works fairly well as a full, two-directional print:

I am currently working on a program that will draw the Koch snowflake. Here's what that looks like:

source here

I am working on this program and hope to have it working soon. It is significantly more complex than the Cantor set. I am on the case! In the meantime, I am laying out designs using a generation 1 curve, which looks like the Star of David:

Of course, I could use an existing image of the Koch snowflake to create the designs and call it a day, but I feel it's important to the concept of the project that I create the forms myself and that I understand the math and programming concepts behind them.

Getting the Koch program to work will be an important step towards creating more complex recursive functions, including Mandelbrot and Julia fractals. I am excited!