Bridges 2026 Exhibition of Mathematical Art, Craft, and Design
Jeffrey Ventrella
Artists
Jeffrey Ventrella
Algorithmic Artist
Petaluma, California, USA
Statement
I'm an artist who started programming computer-generated art in the mid-eighties. In terms of software tools, I'm a minimalist: I use bare-bones vanilla javascript to render colored geometry to a canvas. My creative focus is on algorithms. With a background in visual language, I take on the challenge of expressing mathematical ideas in the visual realm.
Artworks
The Square Root of One Million
50.8 x 50.8 x 1.0 cm
paper print of digital image, with handwriting overlaid in pencil
2026
The divisor plot shows patterns in the divisors of numbers on an axis perpendicular to the number line. This artwork reveals patterns in the neighborhood of the square root of one million, as visualized in the divisor plot. It is accompanied by informal hand-written notes about the patterns and annotations around the edges of the image. The number one million has 24 divisor pairs and 1 square root (1000). The divisor pairs are expressed with yellow arcs. The parabola whose vertex is located at the square root of one million consists of all divisor pairs that sum to 2000.
"Koch Burning" is a series of designs that reveal the Koch curve as a subset of a larger class of fractal curves. This quadriptych is a selection from that series. These fractal curves are made using multiple generators related to the Koch generator (they correspond to Eisenstein integers in the triangular lattice with norm 9).
I discovered these fractal curves with an interactive evolution algorithm I designed. The bottom-right image is an exception: it's a closeup of the Koch Snowflake Sweep.
These curves start as black lines against a white background (the line segments are splined to create smooth curves). Then I take these line drawings and fill-in regions with coloring effects using an imaging tool.