2024 Bridges Conference Short Film Festival

Melissa Schumacher

Filmmakers

Melissa Schumacher

artist

Olympia, Washington, USA

Statement

I have had lifelong interests in math, art, and mixing them together. I enjoy exploring combinations of simple components and rules to see what patterns emerge, which is exemplified in this video. Computers are very efficient at manipulating simple objects according to specific rules, so I wrote a computer program to generate the images in this video, which are based on cellular automata. They're normally studied on a grid of squares, but hexagonal cellular automata have been explored too. I chose hexagons because I like the shape.

Films

Image for entry 'Life on Strange Worlds'

Life on Strange Worlds

00:04:19

Created by Melissa Schumacher Music: "Babylon" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

2024

Watch

This film shows what happens when the Game of Life is played on a hexagonal grid and the sides of the grid are attached to each other in different ways. Originally, I wanted to generate interesting images by writing a computer program that would apply the simple Game-of-Life rules and represent the results in different ways. Then I found that experimenting with the connections between the sides of the grid was also interesting. These connections are indicated in the program by "pseudo-hexagons", which can represent any hexagons at all. This means that even if an object can't really exist in 3D, we can see what its surface would look like. I like to play with different ways of connecting parts of surfaces to each other, and see what effect that has on how the objects on that surface behave. In the film, I show a few of the many possible surfaces, such as Möbius strips, toruses, Klein bottles, and surfaces with sides that are connected in inconsistent ways.