Diffraction art has provided me with natural, logical, unassailable colors.
The pure spectral colors of the visible spectrum are the ones physics is handing to us. I tried to represent them as faithful as possible, owing to this snippet of FORTRAN code.
Code is the best pencil or brush you can use to draw a rainbow: I find in particular pure 0xFF0000 red is a difficult color to reproduce with colored pencils, acrylics, or watercolor. Our eyes seem to be very sensitive to these exact shades of red we expect – from the comparison with the many rainbows we have seen. There is a crystal on my desktop which produces spectacular patches of rainbows by dispersion when the afternoon sun hits is at the right angle. The vibrant reds can compare to the 0xFF0000 red produced by a computer monitor. But with pigments I only managed to produce something that is either too purple or too orange.
I never planned to create “abstract code art” per se, or play with randomness. I always had something precise and mathematical in mind I wanted to bring to life.
I also wanted to combine – to the extent this is even possible: 1) what we observe in a physics experiment and 2) the precise underlying mathematics. Diffraction patterns and the related mathematical functions – diffraction curves – did that for me.
An artwork – code or drawing – is not complete for me, if I haven’t planned for giving it shape and surface in the real world. I found canvas an interesting printing surface, for the contrast between its texture and the clean lines generated by code.
Light at a slanting angle reveals the texture of the canvas.
The canvas frame has a third dimensions. I feel like I craft or sculpt an object – even though I outsource the printing.
The surface and shape I am printing on informs the details of the code. In the Sparse Spectral Spaceport series, I have optimized the thickness, number, and distance of the fine lines so that they would work with textured canvas (just as I had tweaked my Stargate of Diffraction to the peculiarities of printing on mugs).
Here is the complete series I called Sparse Spectral Spaceports: delicate spaceports crafted from the physics of diffraction:
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In this collection of 10 artworks, I am varying the details of the diffraction gratings (how wide the slits are, how far apart, and how many slits there are), and I am also slightly tuning the temperature (of the blackbody creating the source of white light). Finally, I am looking at the resulting 3D structure and pick a view point of my virtual camera that I find interesting.
I am trying to find the unusual in seemingly boring well known science plots.
These images above are mockups of canvas prints: The digital image is wrapped around the canvas frame, extending to the edges.
I have created the original art with my custom JavaScript code based on the 3D library threejs. And then I created a different threejs tool to help me simulate how this gallery wrap will look like in three dimensions, highlighting how the artwork flows over the edges:
Last year, I designed canvas prints – 18″ x 12″, 46cm x 30cm in size. This has been one of my earliest designs.
Since I got requests for larger sizes, I have now designed two more sizes – 26″ x 18″, and 36″ x 24″!
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About the physics and artistic choices
Diffraction gratings are arrays of closely spaced thin grooves or slits. When white light passes through these slits, it is diffracted into rainbow colors: Depending on the angle of deviation, the phase difference between rays of light passing neighboring slits is different – and different colors get “selected” as they are enhanced by positive interference.
As a result, blurry colorful patches or stripes are captured on a screen. In these artworks, I am blending the expected visual experience – rainbow-colored patches with the underlying mathematical functions describing the intensity of diffracted light.
I envisage light of different wavelengths (colors) to be captured on separate cylindrical screens embracing the diffraction grating. Using hand-crafted code, I am embossing this function – intensity over angle – onto each screen, wrapping a curve with a lot of peaks and squiggles around the center. All of these lines together form a colorful fabric.
To make the shape more organic, I wanted to vary the maximum height of peaks with wavelengths. The natural choice was Planck’s Law for blackbody radiation, considering a source of white light similar to our sun: There is a maximum in the green part of the spectrum while the reds and violets are less intense.
In an experiment with such a spectrometer, one would see light diffracted into half of the cylindrical screens, covering angles -90° to 90° but not 90° to -90°. For aesthetic reasons, I completed the circles, mirroring the patterns. This could be accomplished by shining light on the hypothetical diffraction gratings from opposite directions.
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