Nathan Selikoff

Statement

I play with interactivity and motion in time and space, expressing myself through code and leveraging technology to create installations, audio-visual performances, sculptures and prints. I seek to create work that is highly polished while retaining a sense of playfulness and magic. My inspirations include mathematics, music, and nature, and I am particularly interested in the relativity of perception and capturing the essence of change over time in complex systems. My work invites viewers to participate and experience a shifting sense of perspective. As people of all ages interact with my art, they affect the work, and I hope the work affects them, helping them experience the same curiosity and wonder that I do during the creative process.

Artworks

What do you see? An owl? Spider? Spaceship? Our brains are attuned to see faces in bilateral symmetry. This artwork, part of my Faces of Chaos series, is a 2-dimensional plot of the Lyapunov exponent of a chaotic dynamical system. The Lyapunov exponent is a measure of how chaotic a system is: in this case, a strange attractor with a 4-dimensional phase space. Two dimensions are fixed, and two vary in x and y, so that each pixel is a coordinate in the phase space. A custom program renders four 16-bit grayscale images, which represent the different "components" of the spectrum of Lyapunov exponents. These images are combined in Photoshop using a pseudo-color technique to bring out subtle coloration in the final artwork.