1abstract

1ABSTRACT: THE STORY BEHIND THE ARTIST

Timings

Without having any say in the matter, my story begins in a small town in southern Romania in the mid-1970s. I say this because I really hate to define myself by things I didn't choose, like nationality, region, religion, the language I speak or the football team my father supported. However, this is part of the story. I grew up in Ceausescu's Romania, where having parents with connections in "the party" was always an asset. I didn't have any, and this sometimes led to very conflicted feelings during my childhood, but this was normal for many children at that time. Although my working-class family initially had absolutely nothing to do with the arts, art crept into my environment through an unlikely combination of circumstances. One day, a drunken painter forgot his tubes of oil in my grandmother's garden after buying (illegally) mediocre homemade brady pomace. When he never came back, my mother picked them up and started painting, then took some evening art classes. So, I grew up with my mother interested in art and she occasionally painted impressionist oil paintings and watercolors. This may have played a role in my recent discovery of generative art as a new passion, but it's hard to say for sure.

Growing up, I was fortunate to have several key figures in my family who shaped my direction by constantly advising me to "get out of this town." There were two main ways to do this: sports or education. My father really pushed sports on me, and I think it definitely helped me in many ways, including allowing me to travel the country and expand my horizons. However, it didn't work out, I guess in part because my last coach was nothing short of a bully, and I was too young to deal with it. But it was for the best, because it forced me to refocus on my studies. Before high school, I was passionate about two things, anything computer related and anything nature related. I was not confident enough in my mathematical skills so I chose the path of nature conservation and ecology. I took a BSc and an MSc in ecology in Bucharest. I almost dropped out at one point, as I was disappointed by the low quality of the teaching, which focused only on memorizing information, but the prospect of a scholarship abroad allowed me to continue my studies during my master's degree.

Time, as a constant force that shapes our environment, is a recurring theme in my artistic explorations. The vision for this series was to create an algorithm that is parameterized as much as possible by the passage of time. In p5.js, the JavaScript library I used for this project, I implemented this by allowing a multitude of graphical parameters to vary over time via "frameCount", a function that tracks the number of frames that have elapsed since the animation began. Size, shape, stroke weight (the width of lines or dots), fill colour and transparency gradients could vary over time. I didn't have a very clear graphic concept in mind when I started, and I gave myself the freedom to experiment and test multiple ideas. Weeks of experimentation led me to the idea of combining two systems, one based on points and the other on rectangles. The layered, wave-like and splash-like layouts created with the dots were achieved by combining sin and cos functions with gradient noise and a degree of randomness. The tricky part was to parameterize the evolution of the size of the dots over time, so that the larger dots at the beginning of the animation participate in the creation of the background through larger brushes and splashes and the very small dots towards the end of the animation add a texture layer. The second system is based on rectangles of different sizes and shapes that traverse the canvas and, in some iterations, rotate around their point of origin. To increase the diversity of the results, the rectangles appear in two very distinct modes, one more controlled and the other allowing for greater stochasticity. With the two systems in place, the hardest part was tuning them so that when drawn together, they created the harmonious results that are difficult to define. In terms of colours, I gathered over 50 hand-picked palettes. However, the final colours of the artwork are modified based on their red, green, blue and alpha (transparency) channels. To do this, I first converted the hexadecimal colour code to RGBA, which allowed me to introduce additional hue and transparency gradations, which were allowed to vary depending on the "frameCount" or vertical position on the canvas. All of the above procedures were performed on a single main canvas, without buffers or overlays, and the resulting short animation viewed in live mode. The resulting animations range from smooth to chaotic and create a wide variety of unique abstract results ranging from minimalist to complex and aim to contemplate the butterfly effect that timing can have on the results. The experience will take you somewhere, but that can only be captured by the viewer's imagination.