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Jeremy Smith

Artist's Statement:

"Study the science of art and the art of science." -- Leonardo da Vinci

My response in recent years to 'why' has been 'there are these vast realms of incredibly stunning beauty that I keep coming across - it's like being on this great beach that's so perfect you wonder where everybody else is'. It is what gets me up in the morning.

The two main threads, which provide the source of any 'artwork', are the explorations in complexity and alife (artificial life) and the polyhedral work. The former is truly the attempt to replicate processes that (may) occur in life and living systems, and visualize the sometimes very intricate results (e.g. leopard spots and zebra stripes). The latter has revealed numerous realms involving recursion to sub-visible scales and in the many uses found for polyhedra, including developing global grids for mapping, just making them pretty, subsequent analyses of 3D objects, and properties of related objects.

It appears that some explorations in properties and shapes are themselves analytical tools of mathematics and physics, that can subsequently be verified with more traditional mathematics. The visual aspects can eventually be the basis of artistic productions. Empirical mathematics is becoming quite popular, especially in biology - it's like searching for meaning in mathematics visually rather than approaching it formally, and sometimes you can actually see certain constants (pi, phi, e) appear or theorems form.

The polyhedra can be constructed by paper folding, weaving, platting (braiding) and from virtually any material real and virtual including junk mail, recycled trash, industrial waste and recycled electrons. The result might be a simple representation or a puzzle or game. Recent discoveries in aperiodic tiles have opened doorways to a yet another whole realm, a bit like discovering for the first time the golden mean or Fibonacci sequence.

Making the Platonic solids (the five regular polyhedra) provides a fundamental reference point to all things 3d (and 2D) in all fields including mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, complexity, fun and games.

A big drive of the artwork is that I can share (show off) all printable results and artistic creations via the internet. As such, all the polyhedra are available freely for download.

Artist's Biography:
Art is in the family - My parents were artists, having met in art school (London), and I remember seeing many of their fellow art students, who became lifelong friends, when I was growing up. My dad was a cartoon animator in the film industry, but he died young and my mum subsequently became an art teacher and then kindergarten teacher.  My youngest brother is a professional artist, my brother is an architect (London), my sister is both a nurse and school teacher. My dad had a strong technical streak which perhaps accounts for me to become enamored of computers and have a career as a computer programmer. Also we have a younger half-brother via dad who studied mathematics and philosophy at Oxford and is now a mathematics school teacher. (by comparison, none of us sing, dance play an instrument except my artist brother who has drummed for bands and plays a mean penny whistle).

As a programmer, I was always keen on data visualization, so my bosses would have me make charts for publication, and maps. Data visualization has been a burgeoning field since the advent of computers, and clearly has a long way to go. But for persons like me with an artistic eye, the explorations continue to produce amazing outputs, tools for manipulating outputs, and techniques for rendering. The movie industry showcases the high end of this development.

I used to say "One day, I'll be ambushed by the meaning of my life". Some years ago, my best friend from college, who is now the Ahjan (abbot) of a Buddhist monastery, gave me a book entitled 'Complexity'. So I read about complexity and related fields - alife (artificial life), chaos theory, non-linear dynamics, complex adaptive systems, fractals, emergence, synchrony, randomness, and genetic algorithms. Once I began programming genetic algorithms and so on, and making models of processes, the ambush was complete.

After my last 'real' job (early 2002), I completed Randscapes - complex forms from simple algorithms, a CA (cellular automata) model, the results of which were published in the Artificial Life Journal Jan 2003.

Since that time, apart from work on the dictionary project, I have continued exploring the field of alife which assumes Complexity Science, especially complex adaptive systems. There are three avenues in this endeavor 1) formulating a general theory 2) writing models as an exercise in alife 3) developing Java code that creates an optimum framework for exploratory models. An informal description is 'I write small models, but think big'.

A good general theory has emerged, but hasn't been documented yet. Alife exploration so far has been mostly at the CA level and below (how the model interfaces with the computer), which might be compared to physics (and reality). Systems studied include randscapes, diffusion limited aggregation (think Jack frost patterns on the window), pedestrian flow, traffic flow, boids (compelling flock simulation 1982), and all the usual CA models (produce many fundamental forms, like phosphenes). Following stages would model things equivalent to chemistry (eg, reaction diffusion - leopard spots and zebra stripes), and then biology (eg, GAs, neural nets, graphs). Some systems studied include reaction-diffusion, Beloutov-Zhabotinsky reaction, and cyclic particle systems. Concomitant is the insights into emergence, such as the scope of process (is some process local (eg, life is arbitrary) or universal (eg, life is inevitable). In the actual code, a string of programs have been written, the latest of which might be considered a pilot of a general purpose exploratory tool, with a basic MVC design (model-view-controler), and using actual Java as the exploratory language, rather than writing yet another general purpose scripting language geared towards alife modelling.

The mathematics underlying some programs is sometimes overt, as in programs that produce known effects (generating skewed reflections, analyzing color components of graphics, Perlin noise function), and sometimes empirical that becomes apparent through analysis of some system (e.g., the baker's problem - following the path of currants as the baker repeatedly folds and rolls out the dough). Other programs are plain graphics, such as a multi-axis interactive timeline of universe, life, and language.

These studies occur in an environment of reading the usual books and journals, bouncing ideas off friends (former colleagues, scientists, other alifers), and attending related conferences.

Tangents - Being of an artistic bent, the aesthetics of programs and models receives undue attention, although this stimulates ideas about data visualization and aspects of HCI (human computer interface or interaction). However, the outputs of some programs become or evoke art projects. The latest of these was the doodlecatcher, and the creation of specialized cardboard cutout models of the platonic solids (as downloadable PDFs) as part of the local Science and Arts festival.

Visit Jeremy Smith's website.