From Allen Hirsh: My custom software employs sets of elementary functions to elucidate hidden patterns in photographs I use as raw material. Part of my art is the images created, part the invention of my image transformation engine. I try to produce textures and abstractions that are very“painterly". My work also involves the “hybridization” of images that are seemingly incompatible, e.g. flowers and printers.
From JoAnne Growney: As a former mathematics professor, now focusing on poetry, I seek ways to use mathematics in the structure as well as in the content of poems. Beyond mathematics, Allen Hirsh and I share deep concern about climate change – and we thus have strong common ground for collaboration..
Artworks
The Rising Tide of Industrial Flotsam
64 x 86 cm
Mathematically generated art on ultra premium photo paper
The Rising Tide of Industrial Flotsam:
A hybrid of Hirsh’s daughter's printer and an old Dutch windmill handily parodies the drowning of safe technology by the demands of sometimes-frivolous new technology, as exemplified by the blue junk food wrappers mixed in with the distorted printer, and the energy demands of even useful technologies such as the printer itself. This industrial encroachment is paired with Growney’s "Square Math Problem" – an 8x8 syllable-square that ties the exponential growth function to too-late recognition of disaster.
Full text of JoAnne Growney’s poems is provided at the link under more information.
Solar Power Drowning in a Sea of Oil
64 x 86 cm
Mathematically generated art on ultra premium photo paper
Solar Power Drowning in a Sea of Oil:
A transformed amalgam of a Dutch windmill and a vase of silk flowers utilizing trigonometric and power function transformations. I have studied the windmill extensively and several images with a social twist have developed. Growney’s poem “The Final Ones” also describes the relentlessness of environmental degradation – using a structure derived from The Fundamental Theorem of Arithmetic. For example, the poem’s line for the number 6 (= 2 x 3) is “we breathe dirty air and coral reefs die.”
Full text of JoAnne Growney’s poems is provided at the link under more information.
An Outgrabed Mome Rath
64 x 86 cm
Mathematically generated art on ultra premium photo paper
An Outgrabed Mome Rath: A highly transformed amalgam of hibiscus, camellia and antique barn utilizing extensive trigonometric and power function transformations augmented by recursion. The face comports with the very mathematically sophisticated Lewis Carroll's description of a Mome Rath. Paired with this image is the poem "The Disposition of Art" by the mathematician-poet JoAnne Growney. The poem plays with the intersection of Hirsh's image and its mathy sources overlaid with ideas from Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky" -- “ the artist said if equations / can predict the weather / then equations / can recycle Fritos wrappers / into paintings . . .”
Full text of JoAnne Growney’s poems is provided at the link under more information.
