Homage to the Sine
By Stuart Smith
The eight images in this set were produced by interacting sine curves. These S-shaped curves are ubiquitous in the physical world. The AC current coming out of the outlets in our homes has the sine form. Musical tones are combinations of sines, as are radio waves and the different colors of light. The motion of a pendulum can be described as sinusoidal. Using my “artist’s assistant” app I’ve attempted to capture in these images something of the energy of the sine wave.
In 1950 the German painter, Josef Albers, began a series of paintings collectively known as Homage to the Square. This series is defined by an unrelenting adherence to one pictorial formula: the square. Albers intended the paintings to demonstrate color effects and to teach the viewer how the effects can be achieved.
My own work also uses the square, but for a different reason: the key operations of my artist’s assistant require square images as input, i.e., the square is a purely technical requirement rather than an artistic or didactic one. My images can be stretched out into rectangles, but somehow they don’t look quite right when this is done.
In this image the sine curve is clearly visible around the center. Could I have produced this image manually as, say, an oil painting? I strongly doubt it. That’s the reason I created my artist’s assistant.
In this image, fragments of sine curves surround odd-shaped “islands” of muted colors. I normally don’t give my images titles. What would you call this one? In the realm of digitally-generated art — where you can make a huge number of images as easily as you can make one — it would seem absurd to try to give a different name to each of hundreds or thousands of images that are all variations on a single visual theme. When you finally choose one image out of a set, it might make sense to give that image a title that refers to your reason(s) for selecting it. You might say of an image “it reminds me of the shapes and colors of the wreckage of an aviation accident I survived in 2003.”
“Wraparound” rotation of an image right or left and up or down brings the edges of the image out into the image itself. This introduces straight horizontal and vertical lines into the image. See if you can spot a corner of the original image.
You can easily create the wraparound effect with any image on paper. Form the image into a tube and tape the edges together. Cut the tube open along a line parallel to the taped edge. Form the image into a tube again, with the original taped edge making a “belt” around the surface of the tube. Tape the edges together. Cut the tube open along a line parallel to the new taped edge and lay the result out flat. Done.
In this image you can see distorted parallel sine curves around the diagonal that runs from the lower left corner to the upper right corner. You can also see that the image is roughly symmetrical around the diagonal that runs from the upper left corner to the lower right corner. These observations may or may not affect your appreciation of the image. For example, you might instead see an obviously stylized frog jumping out of the lower right corner toward the upper left corner.
Sine waves can produce violent action. For example, long-distance transmission of electricity is typically done with overhead lines at voltages of 115 to 1,200 kV (115,000 to 1,200,000 volts), which is sufficient to incinerate just about anything that comes into contact with the lines.
The sine curve can suggest the gently rolling landscape of some alien world.
©2023 Stuart Smith. All rights reserved
