Abdalla G. M. Ahmed

Independent
Khartoum, Sudan

Since my first Bridges in 2011 I became very enthusiastic to the conference, contributing a paper each year (except 2012). Since 2014 I have also contributed one or more artwork each year. I believe in the mission of Bridges conference, connecting not only math, arts, and music, but also cultures. In the Bridges community I sometimes present myself as possibly the only representative of Africa, which is unfortunately under-represented. I hope to see more people joining the Bridges community from my beloved content, but until then I am committed to fill the gap.
I am specially interested in Algorithmic Art. Most of my Bridges paper are devoted to algorithmic weaving design, and most of my artworks are monochrome and abstract.

Mysterious Script
Mysterious Script
21 x 21 x 1 cm
Foam-mounted paper
2018

This artwork is inspired by my last previous Bridges paper about image weaving, where I presented a modular approach that replaces pixels of a 9-grades greyscale image by 4x4 blocks monochrome blocks from a 256 palette. A close up of the illustrated image in the paper revealed interesting patterns that appear coherent but mysterious. A possible explanation is the low information-theoretic entropy of the blocks, since 50% of the pixels are fixed.
To render this idea into an artwork I wanted to include all the 256 blocks, over an even distribution of grey levels: the average grey should stay 50% everywhere. I used a blue-noise dither matrix for distributing the blocks that were ordered by darkness. The result resembles square-Kufic script.