Description
Qi-HAL Triptych
2026
Interactive generative artwork (HTML-based simulation)
Qi-HAL Triptych is a three-panel interactive system that visualizes how complex patterns emerge from interacting rhythms. The left panel shows oscillatory elements forming temporary attractor-like structures, the center panel depicts a lattice of locally interacting nodes, and the right panel presents a resonance map of relationships between rhythmic bands. Different behavioral states—such as focused attention, searching, sudden insight, mind wandering, sleep, and dreaming—reconfigure the system in real time, allowing viewers to observe how patterns of order and disruption arise and reorganize.
Inspired by Katsushi Arisaka’s Geometry–Gauge Locking theory, the work offers an artistic interpretation of how dynamic systems continually balance coherence and instability.
Medium:
html generative art
Artist Bio:
Aaron Blaisdell is a behavioral neuroscientist and interdisciplinary artist whose work explores
how complex behavior and patterns of organization emerge from simple interacting systems. He is Professor of Behavioral Neuroscience at the University of California, Los Angeles, where his scientific research investigates learning, memory, and cognition across species.
Alongside his scientific career, Blaisdell develops generative and conceptual artworks that translate ideas from neuroscience, physics, and complex systems into visual and interactive forms. His work often treats artistic media as dynamic systems rather than static images, creating environments in which patterns emerge, reorganize, and evolve over time.
A recurring theme in Blaisdell’s work is the relationship between biological intelligence and collective behavior. His long-running Pigeon Art Project explores this intersection by collaborating with pigeons as co-creators in experimental art processes that draw on principles from animal cognition research. The project examines how nonhuman animals perceive and interact with images, challenging conventional ideas about authorship, creativity, and perception.
In recent work, Blaisdell has begun translating theoretical ideas from physics and complex systems into generative digital artworks. Qi-HAL Triptych is an interactive piece inspired by physicist Katsushi Arisaka’s Geometry–Gauge Locking theory, presenting a dynamic visual field in which rhythms, interactions, and perturbations continuously reorganize patterns of coherence.
Through both scientific research and artistic practice, Blaisdell investigates how structured behavior emerges from distributed processes. His work occupies a space between laboratory experiment, generative system, and aesthetic experience, inviting viewers to observe the dynamics of organization as they unfold in real time.
Artist Statement:
My work explores science and nature through dynamical systems. The current work reveals how
complex patterns of organization emerge from the interactions of many simple elements. These dynamics appear across many domains, from neural activity and collective behavior to physical systems described in theoretical physics. Through generative and interactive artworks, I aim to translate these processes into visual experiences that unfold in real time.
My practice involves a diverse array of techniques, such as collaborating with non-human intentional systems, such as pigeons, to explore color and space within constrained digital systems, to utilizing Ai and code to build computational systems that behave less like static images and more like living environments. Instead of composing a single fixed picture, in the current work, I design sets of rules that allow patterns to develop, interact, and evolve. The resulting works invite viewers to observe the emergence of coherence, instability, and reorganization as ongoing processes rather than finished states.
An important influence on this body of work is the Geometry–Gauge Locking theory proposed by physicist Katsushi Arisaka. The theory suggests deep relationships between symmetry, geometry, and the organization of physical systems. While my work is not a scientific model of the theory, it is inspired by its conceptual implications—particularly the idea that complex order can arise from underlying relational structures.
In this work, I explore how rhythms, interactions, and feedback loops generate dynamic fields of
behavior. I hope viewers approach these pieces not only as images but as environments to
observe over time—systems whose patterns continually negotiate between stability and change.