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Dr. Günter Bachelier - The basic level of my Evolutionary Art

img-12The basic level refers to the production of individual works of art. This first level raises purely artistic  questions about shape, composition and colour.
I was strongly influenced by art styles such as Informel  {MuseumOstwall2002a, MuseumOstwall2002b, MuseumOstwall2003, MuseumOstwall2004}, Abstract Expressionism {Herskovic2003} and Action Painting, as well as by artists such as Hans Hartung {Hartung1981} and Jackson Pollock {VarnedoeKarmel1998}.

Pollock's dripping technique led me to the development of different methods of self-organizing painting, long before I came across the  term "self-organizing painting". I was, and still am, fascinated by the ability of materials to build complex structures only by means of their physical and chemical properties. These structures are dynamic and the most interesting of them are far from balance. Therefore, capturing  these interesting  structures by photographing them was natural to me, which led me to abstract photography. A large archive of abstract photographs was accumulated over the years and they were digitized in the early 1990's. This marks a  turning point because my work shifted from conventional visual art, such as  painting, to computer aided art, using, however, conventional image processing methods.

These abstract (macro) photos have associations to satellite images of the earth and other planets. This is no coincidence because the dynamic effects that shape landscapes and atmospheric structures belong to the same class as  the effects that shape the structures in self-organizing painting (dynamic structures in fluids, see fig.1).

Fig.1: Example of a digitized macro photo as part of a self-organized painting (PCD_001_24_P_046)
PCD_001_24_P_046


The idea of a "contrast aesthetics" developed over the years and I tried to recombine contrasting and partially contradicting concepts to create both aesthetic and interesting works. The biological concept of symbiosis constituted an increasingly important metaphor for this integration. To date, the  following concepts have been integrated in my works:

Questions about symmetry and symmetry breaking have become specially under focus in the last two years. Bilateral symmetry is used in most cases  because there are neural and evolutionary biological correlations to aesthetic  feelings. This is shown by the scientific research on aesthetics which can be exemplified by studies about the attractiveness of faces. Given that social beings humans depend on recognizing and interpreting faces  and facial expressions, a large part of the visual system is focused on face recognition. Faces have an overall bilateral symmetry, although they present plenty of small local symmetry breaking (the same can be said about the bodies of most animals). Therefore, the visual system specializes in recognizing bilateral symmetry and its deviations.

There is a long standing hypothesis according to which symmetric faces are more often selected, given the task to select faces with higher attractiveness {ThornhillGangestad1993}. Some empirical studies validate this hypothesis {ThornhillGangestad1993} specially if female subjects are selecting male faces, although other studies came to inconclusive results ({Braun2001}, {Johnstone1994}. The attractiveness of symmetric faces could be explained by evolutionary biology. The deviation from a symmetric ideal could point towards development alterations which might be caused by genetic defects or by parasitic influences. Both cases would possibly affect reproduction success, therefore, reproduction partners with symmetric properties are preferred. Such an explanation would indicate that aesthetics has an established foundation in evolutionary biology {VolandGrammer2003}.

The starting point for me to develop a meta-strategy to find a balance between symmetry and symmetry breaking, was based on the positive correlation between symmetry and aesthetic feeling (on the one hand) and between symmetry and boredom after some time of perception (on the other), so as to find aesthetic and interesting works of art.


References


BasicLevel - EvoArt - EvoArt1 -  EvoArt2