When I was a young boy, I felt a warmth spread through me each time I looked up at the kitchen design in my parent’s home. I was struck by the color combinations and different textures: white brick, blue-algea colored slate, dark chocolate floors, moss grey ceiling, and many different stains on the wood—the exposed beams, panels, forms, trims, doors, and windows. In a moment of inspiration, I counted the stains: 13 in all. I realized I wouldn’t have even noticed if I hadn’t stopped to count them. In other architectural structures, I began noticing the number and range of color and texture, correlating them with my sensations.

 

When I was a third-grader, I began to draw a barnyard scene. At that particular time, I was enchanted with multidimensional color and how they blended and made things seem more real or interesting. Maybe I had seen the palettes of my grandmother and my mother, globs of similar colors mixed together, finally becoming a work on canvas, realizing the colors added something other than color, but I wasn’t sure how I had become so intrigued with this singular thing. From lime to deep forest green, I laid out every green pastel I had and began to draw the grassy area around the barn. I did the same with the reds for the barn, and then the blues for the sky and the browns for the fence. I entered the final work into an art show and, to my astonishment, won the grand prize.

 

Later in life, I realized I had stumbled onto complexity theory and, in some relation, information theory without knowing what it was. Beauty, grace, and communication—rich subjective experiences—require some level of complexity to stimulate the nervous system, which makes sense, but neuroscientists have indicated that our nervous systems are more comfortable when perceiving complexity. At the extreme, we can apprehend this idea easily. We wouldn’t, for instance, enjoy a concert where a trumpet player stood alone on stage and played one note at one dynamic level for the whole time. To tailor messages for the nervous system, we need to add variation somewhere and somehow, pushing the expression toward complexity.

 

But defining complexity is tricky. Some researchers, such as Guy Birkin, draw upon complexity theory, information theory, data theory, and other specialized disciplines to begin to correlate complexity with an aesthetic experience. (See his thesis Aesthetic Complexity: Practise and Perception in Art and Design). He defines visual complexity as a blend of chaos and order: a balance of complexity allows for visual exploration and pattern-finding, which contributes to aesthetic value. In nearly all definitions, though, approached from many angles, there seems to be a threshold where the mind becomes comfortable and the complexity begins to correlate with an aesthetic perception—and this holds true in my own experience.

 

In this sense, complexity doesn’t equate to chaos, nor even the number of parts, as in a rocketship being more complex than a can opener. Rather, I am hunting for the complexity that engages the mind, to offer enough variation to elaborate on a given theme. I think the challenge comes in layers of perception, along multiple channels, where we would perceive a pattern at one level, while great variety operates at another level. Overall, the expression might seem simple, but would nevertheless engage the mind.

 

As a working example, I am currently designing the liquid light expression for the Towers of the Mind. In the final design of liquid light, we should end up with an anthropomorphic quality to the liquid light, where something like “personality” emerges. To achieve such an ambitious goal, we will need to generate complexity at many levels—color, color transformations, form, motion, motion speeds, durations, fade durations, pattern generations, and so on. In the following experiment, I am exploring complexity in color only, both how to generate it and how to use and understand it, especially in how it might contribute independently to anthropomorphic qualities in combination with other levels.

 

First, using a computer graphics program, I created 18 simple lights that share the same color. Notice that the light has the same color hue from bright areas to outer glows.

 

In the second part of this experiment, I first changed the color source from a single color to a gradient, generating a range of colors.

 

Next, I mapped this gradient to a plane, spreading it over the surface.

 

 

Next, I injected noise into how the colors spread over the plane by a mathematical formula.

 

 

Finally, I animated the mapping over the plane’s surface while adjusting the formula, generating “a moving surface of color.”

 

Finally, through the computer tools, I mapped each of the 18 lights to the plane, so that each one would dynamically pick up a different color at any given frame.

 

 

 

By stopping the movie and stepping through frame by frame, we can see many shades come into the light, even on a single frame, where the source color might radiate into a different color at the outer glow. We can also see the pulsing pattern independently of the color changes, an example of seeing patterns within patterns.

 

This is the first experiment with working toward telling a coherent story in color by itself. In future experiments, I examine how to introduce coherent and meaningful patterns among the play of color changes; the degree of color changes; the rate of change of color; and the spread of color over a given area—all with zeriosantalios. After that, we will see about combinations of lights—with their combination of effects—to better simulate the real towers.

 

 

 

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