About biologika:

The images in biologika represent some of my explorations of the deep links between mathematics and nature, and the way biological forms may use simple rules to evolve complex shape and behaviour. These 13 works are not painted or modelled in any traditional or digital sense, but are constructed directly from sets of relatively simple mathematical descriptions of flat space.

This mathematical space is the basis of an exciting level of emergent complexity which I have guided to evoke the kinds of lush erotic forms that we identify as plants and flowers.

There is a real and intriguing mystery here. Each of the biologika images has been conjured from chains of numbers, yet we readily understand the carnivorous sexual darkness in them as something organic. At a very fundamental level, there is no coincidence involved.

Peter Miller 2005

Exhibition:

biologika is currently on loan to SV Partners, a legal firm in Sydney, Australia.

Technical Details:

The images of biologika are not created by conventional 3D modelling or digital painting techniques. They are formed purely from mathematical systems that distort 2- Dimensional Cartesian space in various ways and assign values to the luminance and RGB colour distribution of those distortions.

Each of the systems that describes any individual image is made up of a number of discrete but quite simple algorithms that influence one another according to the ways in which they are connected. Some parts of the system determine symmetry, iteration values, rotation and displacement. Other components control pixel colour and brightness or darkness.

Any of the mathematical descriptors, acting on its own, is fairly simply deterministic, and its output is readily understood. The real excitement in the creation of these images lies in the phenomenon of emergent complexity, a quality that arises from the maths when the numbers of individual components and the numbers and types of the connections between them exceed a certain, fairly minimal, threshold. When this point is reached, the number of variables in the system is so great that the output values that control the final colour and light renderings cannot be anticipated in any formal sense.

Consequently, once the basic system structures have been designed, tools for mutation of selected characteristics and choice of preferred outputs are used to ‘sculpt’ the emergent mathematical space according to aesthetic criteria. It is highly probable that this resultant complex space cannot be usefully navigated in any way other than intuitively and aesthetically. The process is like a kind of visual ‘jamming’.

What is truly surprising is that the detailed images that can be generated by these chains of simple rules often feel familiar. All kinds of vital organic patterns, textures and shapes arise from descriptions that seem purely mechanistic and devoid of life. Some thinkers have recently and controversially proposed that similar kinds of simple rules evoking complex emergent behaviour might underpin everything from economic and social systems to biology to the physics of our universe itself.

Recommended reading:

Ian Stewart Life’s Other Secret
ISBN: 0471296511

Paul Davies The Fifth Miracle
ISBN: 068486309X

Philip Ball The Self-Made Tapestry: Pattern Formation in Nature
ISBN: 0198502443

Stephen Wolfram A New Kind of Science
ISBN: 1579550088

Ivars Peterson The Jungles of Randomness
ISBN: 0471164496