Mircea Draghicescu
Artists
Statement
Being mathematical proofs, algorithms have an intrinsic aesthetic quality and I am interested in making their beauty visible through works of generative art. Sorting algorithms have often been a topic for visualization; the image presented here is an example of the output produced by a new method which will be presented in a Bridges 2019 short paper. Each generated image can be seen as an evolution from "chaos" (the bottom row of pixels) to "order" (the top row) through a sequence of intermediate steps (the other rows of the image, bottom-up).
Artworks
Sorting
40 x 50 cm
photo print
2019
The “ordered” sequence of pixels (the top row of the image) consists here of 3 repetitions of the black-white grey scale, We separate the RGB components, shuffle the obtained sequences (here just reverse them), and reassemble them into the “scrambled” sequence of pixels (the bottom row).
Sort the scrambled sequences separately using 3 sorting processes (here quick, insertion, and selection sort, respectively). During sorting, take some snapshots; after each snapshot reassemble the 3 intermediate (partially sorted) sequences into a new row of pixels.
Note that we sort not pixels, but RGB components (numbers). The 3 sets of RGB values are the same in each row,
but their order is different, and thus each row has a different set of pixels.