David Bachman
I explore ways in which mathematics can be used to produce form. The results are sometimes precise, pre-planned shapes, but more often they are things that have evolved from the mathematics in ways I could not exactly predict. The discordance between the precision of mathematics and the unpredictable nature of what it can produce is what fascinates me most.
The body of this dragonfly is taken from a photograph, while the wings were computationally generated. A variety of algorithms were used to create them. First, a set of points were randomly populated across each wing and moved by a circle packing algorithm, where the radius of each circle was inversely proportional to the distance from the body. Next, those points were used to create a Voronoi diagram. Main veins were located by a shortest walk algorithm through the edges of this diagram, and those veins were given a variable thickness according to the distance travelled as you traverse them outward from the body.