Flowing Ellipses 7

Am I an old fart, closer to the end than to the start? Or closer to zero than infinity, closer to nothing than everything? There will be a quiz.

Now days, anyone can generate cartoons just by whispering the right words into an AI's electronic ear. At the other end of the spectrum, huge corporations can hire hundreds of animators and throw vast amounts of computer resources and dollars into creating animated works. What's an independent artist to do? How can one make distinctive works that not only aesthetically stand out, but thematically stand out?

It has been an incredible, pin-wheeling journey to get to this point. My interests have always been quite varied: jazz, comics, art, math, science, literature, photography, all things space, railroads, movies. I briefly worked part time as a location scout when I graduated college, but the lack of work and hand to mouth, free-lance nature of the business didn't pay the bills. Besides, something else was calling me. Wanting to give back to the community, I got certified to teach math and English and took a job at a high school for at-risk students. Talk about a challenge.

To a lot of kids, math is nothing more than an esoteric exercise in repetitiveness. Solve for x, graph this, prove that. Over the course of my teaching career, I had to seize upon different approaches to make math more interesting and more approachable. Applying mathematic principles to making art was one of them. We tessellated. We created chaos. We also collected math cartoons.

That was at least two careers ago. But the use of math, especially the idea of using chance, probabilities and randomness to generate art has stuck with me. We make choices all of the time in life and in art. An artist is faced with myriad of choices; the medium, the subject, the method, the color, and the constraints of those choices, just to name a few. I try to express that in my work. For my generative art, I don't know how a work really is going to turn out, because every time I run a program, the result is different. Depending on the constraints I set, it dances between order and chaos. Just like life.