The Front exhibition by Jonathan McCabe

More stuff at Brightcove
About the Artist:
Jonathan McCabe is interested in theories of biological pattern formation and evolution and their application to computer art. He likes to write computer programs which measure statistical properties of images for use in artificial evolution of computer art. He has a Masters of Art from the Australian National University and an expensive ink habit.
Previous exhibitions include a group exhibition "still.moving" at Strathnairn Gallery in April 2000 and solo exhibition "Trace of Maps" at The Street Theatre in June 2001.
His most recent commercial success was in selling limited reproduction rights of three patterns to a Russian company via a German image broker for the covers of notebooks.
His animations have been used by local Video Jockeys and at a London rave.

About the Method:
The technique used to produce these images was partially inspired by an article about how butterfly wings develop their patterns. It seems that each scale in the developing wing colours itself depending on the relative levels of various substances diffusing away from point or line sources. The input into the process is purely the position in the image, the image is a kind of decoding and re-encoding of that information into the three dimensional space of colour. Each image is a different interpretation of the same initial positional information.
The patterns are made by repeated foldings, rotations and shifts, and then each point is coloured depending on its positions during the operation. A process of artificial evolution was employed to develop the final images, involving repeated variation, selection and "cross breeding" of the recipes used to generate the images. The program attempts to optimise various properties of the image, including the diversity of sub-patterns and the occurrence of structure at different scales.

Links (relentless productisation!):

tiles anyone?

scarves (3 are my design)

prints

Contact:
Jonathan.McCabe@anu.edu.au