The Sparse Spaceport series captures the essence of what I am trying to do with code art inspired by physics:
~ I want to convey the beauty of a phenomenon in physics – the diffraction of white light into rainbow colors, but (optionally) also the beauty of the underlying math.
~ I want to reconnect with my roots as a scientist, and I am trying to pick something I have experience with. Here, I chose optics, as one of my first specializations, a long time ago, was laser physics and optics. (For similar reasons I had also art-i-fied thermodynamics and turned solutions of the heat equations into art earlier – temperature waves.)
~ Using the pure spectral colors of the rainbow to color mathematical curves allows me to “overlap” or create a composite of two closely related things:
~~ The patterns we actually see when light is diffracted by diffraction gratings: blurry, rainbow-y stripes of diffraction patterns.
~~ The underlying math: a “stripe” in the pattern is replaced by a peak in the curve of the same color.
I am positioning the diffraction curves – intensity over position on hypothetical cylindrical screens. Each color would be captured on a cylinder of different radius.
~ I try to spot something surprising and enigmatic while playing with well-known physics. I am rotating this three-dimensional structure, and I am panning my virtual camera to find an interesting viewpoint. Admittedly, this makes the image less educational. This is a trade-off I am willing to make. I want my art to speak for itself, just as an abstract piece.
For this series, each artwork got a Greek letter. The one I had not yet featured in a blog post is Alpha, the first one in this gallery! Of all diffraction artworks this one is the one showing explicitly what is going on. I mount diffraction curves onto circles. The red peaks appear to move away as red is diffracted more (at higher angles) than blue.
I called it a “sparse” spaceport because I was trying to reduce the number of lines (diffraction curves). Compared to other diffraction art (e.g. the Atoll of Diffraction series), you individual lines rather than a fabric.
The diffraction grating that would cause the Alpha patterns has eleven slits, so there are ten smaller maxima (little squiggles) between the larger peaks. When light would hit the grating, it would be diffracted “forward” into a half cylinder. However, that would cut off my pattern. In my hypothetical scenario, another beam of white light would hit the grating from the opposite direction. I combine the two halves and each of the curves covers the full circle.
Created with custom JavaScript code based on the framework threejs! My tools are a text editor and a browser!
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Blog posts about the other spaceports in the series:
Psi: Sparse Spectral Spaceport: Psi Psi Star
Phi: Sparse Spaceport Morphs Into Curtain of Dancing Oscillations – with found poetry
Lambda: Lifting the Veil. Dramatically, and Starting from Violet. – – with found poetry
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