2018 Bridges Conference

Abdalla G. M. Ahmed

Artists

Statement

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.

Artworks

Image for entry 'Mysterious Script'

Mysterious Script

21 x 21 x 1 cm

Foam-mounted paper

2018

Additional info

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.