This page shows works made with Robert Woodley, a programmer interested in mathematical visualization. There’s a range of full collaborations (the face field project) and experiments resulting from translations between media and contexts, in conversation. Inspiration is taken from topology, and more recently abstract algebra, particularly symmetry, and its intersections with physics.
Performative Topologies – Many Figures Form a Ground
For “Many Figures Form a Ground” I work with small groups of lay performers, developing short choreographic sequences through a number of playful questions and tasks that elicit body knowledge. By developing their personal movements, participants become ‘game figures’. As game figures, they are invited to jointly perform, relating to each other. This creates the ‘game board.’
As performers iterate their personal game sequences, their interaction is recorded with a Ricoh Theta V 360 degree camera. That footage is piped through a special purpose program, custom written by programmer Robert Woodley, using three.js and WebGL. The sphere of so-called 360 video is identified with the Reimann Sphere and the code applies Möebius transformations that stretch, twist and invert the equirectangular video image to our specifications.
By additionally overlaying multiple versions of the image, we are able to create a visual result that reminds of animated charcoal drawings, showing idiosyncratic movements produced by rotating figures in an undulating space. Performers are no longer isolated, but become part of the web of the surrounding space. Many figures form a ground. This work is part of an ongoing body of work under the heading of Performative Diagrammatics that deals with the creation of a relational world between text and image, in which figure and ground are no longer separate, but interwoven.
The Gaze – drawings as partial response to the Artist as Problem Solver Convening, Indianapolis, March 2018
A series of 20 drawings on transparent backgrounds, here randomly superimposed in groups of four each time the site is refreshed. Possible number of combinations is 20!/16! = 20 x 19 x 18 x 17 = 116,280. (Tap/click/Command R to refresh after clicking through to site)
The Face Field Project
How Artists Work. Studio Composites (Mers) and Animation Experiments (Woodley).
Conversation with Ken Vandermark:
“Pixelcube” Animation Experiment by Robert Woodley
Reference:
https://phys.org/news/2015-01-analysis-self-propel-subatomic-particles.html#jCp
“The electron’s wave packet is not just accelerating, it’s also expanding,” Kaminer says, “so there is some part of it that compensates. It’s referred to as the tail of the wave packet, and it will go backward, so the total momentum will be conserved. There is another part of the wave packet that is paying the price for the main part’s acceleration.”
Conversation with James Falzone:
Topological Animation Experiment by Robert Woodley
Reference:
Conversation with Tomeka Reid:
Animation Experiment by Robert Woodley
Reference :
Performative Diagrammatics 