Four Dragons is a recent work commissioned by Yanjian Group (Australia) P/L for the external lobby of The Midtown Apartments in Brisbane's CBD. It consists of a 1.75m square LED screen attached to the lobby ceiling and visible from the public areas of the street. The kinetic painting runs 24/7 in real-time on a small laptop computer.
It continues my interest in real-time code & generative art and artificial life, fields I have been involved in since the early 1970's. Like most of my recent time-based works the image is composed of square tiles that have a number of symmetries and a cellular automaton—where each tile looks at its immediate neighbours—determines how these tiles change and morph into each other.
I have described my work as The Geometric Sublime. The term is borrowed from Jon McCormack and Alan Dorin's paper Art, emergence, and the computational sublime from the proceedings of Second Iteration: a conference on generative systems in the electronic arts, CEMA, Melbourne, Australia, 2001. The authors discuss the phenomenon of emergence where often-simple systems can produce seemingly infinite progressions of complex, coherent and often novel data and/or behavior. In my work very simple geometries are employed that, despite their rudimentary simplicity, can be permutated to create extremely large and complex sets of images.
The total number of permutations of the Four Dragons system (the total count of individual images—or frames—the code can generate) is 436 or about 4,700,000,000,000,000,000,000—a number so huge it is difficult for humans to comprehend (for comparison there have been approximately 440,000,000,000,000,000 seconds since the Universe began). The cellular automaton provides a way of exploring this vast abstract universe of potential interest in a non-linear way. The animation you see is the automaton's dynamic report on its progress—like a snail's trace on a mildewed window.
I trace my origins as an artist to System Art, Art Concrete, Dada and Constructivism.
The artwork was coded in Processing, the open-source Java development environment initiated by Casey Reas and Ben Fry. Picnic Pete of Cascade Blaze provided additional Linux software and system support.
Brecknock Consulting managed the public artwork and the LED screen was designed and installed by Albert Smith Group, P/L.
Paul Brown is an artist and writer who has specialized in art, science & technology since the late-1960s and in computational & generative art since the mid 1970s. His early work included the creation of large-scale lighting works for musicians and performance groups (Meredith Monk, Music Electronica Viva, Pink Floyd, etc...) and he has an international exhibition record that includes the creation of both permanent and temporary public artworks dating from the late 1960s.
During 2000/2001 he was a New Media Arts Fellow of the Australia Council and he spent 2000 as artist-in-residence at the Centre for Computational Neuroscience and Robotics (CCNR) at the University of Sussex in Brighton, England. From 2005 he has been honorary visiting professor of art and technology at the CCNR and department of Informatics at the University of Sussex. His artwork has recently been exhibited in the Alan Turing Centenary exhibition—Intuition and Ingenuity—currently touring the UK and in the 2012 Microwave Festival in Hong Kong. His book White Heat Cold Logic, British Computer Arts 1960-1980, co-edited with Charlie Gere, Nick Lambert and Catherine Mason, is published by MIT Press, Leonardo Imprint.
His website is always out-of-date at Paul-Brown.com.
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