Equation Art

Equation Art - Patrick Sean

Aged 21, and a computer science graduate, his name is Patrick Sean Heddles. A young and enthusiast individual who worked on a holiday project on ray-tracer (path taken by light before reaching the eye). With little knowledge on the subject, he has to start from scratch. However, things didn’t work out and his project ultimately failed.

Although the project didn’t go as planned, he was able to create a new type of art, something that very few people have ever done (according to wikipedia.org, only Andrew McCann have done equation art). He was able to create abstract images through the ‘simple code’ and so it all started from there.

There isn’t much background information I could find on Patrick Sean, nor a portrait of himself. He has been writing poets, songs as well as a singer for a long time. Not only that, he has also been composing. Even though, he never got much into drawing or painting, he created something totally new, the “Equation Art”

So what exactly is equation art? Extracted from wikipedia.org “Equation art is the name for an art form producing images in which the colour of each point…is defined as a mathematical function…”

With limited information concerning equation art, I would like to make this study as descriptive as possible.

Continuing from where Patrick left of on the ray-trace project, he used simplified programming skills to create something different and new. He created a scenario such that the rays were perpendicular to the eyes helping him to rely on the distance of the mid-point. Such concept nearly ruined the whole project; however there is another twist in the tale. He worked on setting the brightness of each point was give functions to the X and Y coordinates on a C program. Filling in the coordinates of the axis with the color combination (set by equations to represent different colours such as red, green, etc), a number will be representing that particular pixel of the canvas. Therefore, depending on the size of the canvas, the more equations will be needed to create the art. This is basically the process of creating equation art. The following image was the first image he created from an equation/through this project.

Over the past three years, Patrick has created over 100 images using such equations. With the basic concept staying the same, it is the techniques and understanding that have grown from image to image. The algorithms change from each picture to another as they all produce different results. Here are some of his images that he has created using equation art.

Puppet 1 - 26 Jul 2005

Jewel - 15 Feb 2004

Since equation is newly developed and still relatively unkown, there aren't any review that I found over the net and therefore, I will critque the art myself. There were over 100 artwork on Patrick website and I chose the best ones. I like the colour combination used in the Jewel art because from the center of the picture, it basically spreads out in all directions. Whereas, in the puppet art, we can see that the background seems a bit dull compared to Jewel.

According to my search, the artist has providedinformation as to what kind of software they have used to create such kind of equation art. They use 'C' program to do all the coding because it runs faster than other compliers. With reference to two equation art artists, they have done Java programming helping them to input the different coordinates and the rest of the code in the complier.

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References: Patrick Web Site, Rebecca Skinner Site, Equation Art (Wikipedia)