When you draw on paper you see your artwork emerging gradually. You see how it looks like in the real world (Of course it does! Sounds trivial!).
When I am creating digital art, I also see it emerging slowly. I am creating art with code, and it takes many iterations of the code until I feel an image is finished. Often, I have an idea and start coding, but temporary results push me in a different direction. This often comes as a surprise as I use straight-forward predictable mathematics, not Artificial Intelligence.
But I see digital images emerging on screens. I see them on different devices, and I test the variations in the way monitors and tablets actually display my colors. But it is all screens, illuminated bright pixels.
I figured that any sort of print can only be less vibrant than an electronic display. Thus, I have been hesitant to bring my digital art into the real world for a while.
Until I did it!
This is an image of my series Reality and Imagination – as an acrylic print:
I went for acrylic prints, as the shiny acrylic glass adds depth to the image. It makes the picture as similar as possible to the digital original. I had it printed at a standard print shop for photos, and I was impressed by the result.
Some print shops warn you when you select acrylic prints: There will be reflections! 😱
But I feel that reflections could add to the artwork if they are not pronounced. Direct light should hit the artwork from at a rather small grazing angle. Not placing the image on a wall opposite a window or too close to a lamp works well.
The gold and blue structures depicted in Reality and Imagination are real and imaginary parts of the complex function 1/z. I’m just mentioning it to hint at the origin of the name! This complicated sounding functions turns out to be: Just stacks of exactly circular rings! You could build them by placing tubes bent into rings one upon each other. The rings are arranged eccentrically, as if a point on each ring was soldered to an infinitely long wire running in the vertical direction. The two towers intersect, and one line of intersection is this vertical.
Cutting through each other.
Chasing each other.
Meeting in the center,
leaning on each other,
forming an infinite line.
I had been playing with these functions for a long time, and I had always envisaged them as built from wires or tubes. Finally, I found a way to display them as such!
Now I am noticing how the vague reflections of window grids and curtains gently poke at my mighty towers from metallic tubes, and it feels right! Alien ethereal architecture meeting traditional building styles, maybe?
~
How could I make this blog post any weirder? By asking ChatGPT for poetic help!
Could you create a haiku using as many words as possible from this phrase: “vague reflections of window grids and curtains gently poke at my mighty towers from metallic tubes”?
… and the bot responds:
Window grids dance,
Curtains gently poke, towers rise
Metallic tubes hum.
~
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