In many ways, machines today are becoming more and more human. They perform intense computations, learn from their mistakes, and respond to stimuli. However, they lack finality. My piece aims to explore, bridge, and ultimately delineate what it means to be human by contrasting themes of growth, response, and death through a coded medium.
Visually and thematically, the piece echos MC Escher’s 1953 lithograph Concentric Rinds, a series of well ordered, concentric, and circumscribed spheres grounded on an inky void with light emanating from the center. Escher was a classically trained mathematician, and technically, his etchings have a machine-like perfection to them. Intellectually though, his pieces rebel against perfection through illusions and contortions of perspective. While machines excel at performing repetitive and well organized tasks, they lack the creativity to expand artistically – or non-functionally – beyond rote tasks. Escher is still relevant in a world of perfected digital art for technical prowess and the creative genius to harness and manipulate mathematical perspective.
For my piece, I want to explore the finality and uniqueness of human life. Machines differ from us in that they can reproduce without losing knowledge. My piece aims to echo MC Escher’s genius by contrasting the technical successes of coded routines with the finality and unique spark of human life. Concentric Rinds is a whole and encompassed shape, a bright and lonely vessel in a stygian darkness. In its concentric shapes and centralized composition, my piece draws heavy visual inspiration from Concentric Rinds. It seeks to reproduce the loneliness and uniqueness of human life in emptiness. By expressing this through code, I hope to both reference MC Escher’s technical perfectionism while contrasting the distributed nature of code with the uniqueness of human life.
A fundamental condition of humanity is individual growth and reflection before ultimately succumbing to death. My piece is further inspired by Claude Monet’s early 20th century Water Lilies series, a collection of over 250 paintings that encompass the growth of a productive career while arrestingly documenting the setbacks of physical fragility. Monet was an early pioneer of the groundbreaking impressionistic style that revolutionized modern painting from austere classical perfection to loose interpretations and inferences. Tragically, by the end of his life he was beset by cataracts that rendered him nearly blind. The Water Lilies series is the final capstone on his impressionistic style. While smudged lines, blurred shapes, and blended colors hint at his subject and harken to his pioneering painting technique, the blurriness of the paintings also reveal his personal struggle with encroaching blindness.
My piece references Monet’s career as a groundbreaking painter and his struggle with physical fragility with themes of growth, encompassment, and reaction. It’s a common UI assumption that paging or scrolling will carry an audience through a medium. Building on that assumption, I will combine a growing visual ripple with a soundtrack to signify the growth and appreciation of life. As the user scrolls, concentric shapes emanate from the center, like rings on a tree, signifying growth. At the same time, an accompanying soundtrack plays paced to the rate of scroll, encouraging the audience to explore at a reasonable pace – like life, the piece cannot be enjoyed too quickly. To represent the indelible marks that setbacks and events can leave, as the user clicks on the piece – literally triggering events on a symbol of growth – further ripples and shapes will appear like water lilies rippling on the surface of a pond. Once the user approaches the end of the experience, all of the content but a black background will disappear to represent the finality of death.
I will use JS to accomplish the scrolling effect: animate the shapes, manipulate the speed of the music, and create the ripple effects. I will use CSS to style the web page and might use CSS keyframes to enhance the animations. For the background music, I will use a piano cover by Vincent Corver of one of my original songs.