“True Under Certain Conditions”, I read in this quote a longing for a logical, stepwise way to assess truth. An algorithmic moral compass, a hope that the rigor of mathematical logic might carve a clean path through the informational wreckage left behind by ambition and power. The visuals I created retain little of that hope for simplicity. Instead, a shifting, unstable landscape of noise absorbs individual actions, reshaped by the movement of every other element. Each voxel, each discrete moment, seems insignificant on its own. Yet every absence, every chance changes the greater motion fundamentally.
Patterns emerge that could not exist without the smallest parts. No single element perceives the whole, yet each one shapes everything. The truth tables of logic are hidden, silent. They drive the table-based cellular automata, variations on classical automata, weaving their patterns on screen. They are the hidden syntax behind the visuals, the machinery behind the noise. They are the building blocks of the digital code, a construct of strict logic.
The underlying geometric substrate is rigid, unyielding. Each cube either exists or doesn’t. True or false. From this binary substrate, infinite variation arises. In some parts, these variations are intentionally nonsensical. Allowed by the system, they display a state that cannot be held by a single element. Apparently coherent shapes are simultaneously rotating in two different directions, are simultaneously showing different views.
It is not accidental that I chose to use a generative art approach for this work. For me, the art of rules, of systems, of interactions, of complexity and emergence, is the art form that most fittingly captures the feeling of being lost in, while at the same time being instrumental to, everything that happens around us.