Thomas Briggs Art Website

[Nahee_Enterprises]

According to Thomas himself, the works are generated by proprietary software, then printed.  He does preliminary drawings to lay out the general structure of the works, but does not use them directly in the production of the final works:

     http://www.SalientImages.com/

Thomas says that when it comes to the underlying mathematics and processes involved, his methods are closer to the methods of physics simulation and data visualization.  Thomas comes from a background of CGI effects animation, where any and all methodologies are tried.
 

[lycium]

Interesting link, thx Paul 

there's more info at  http://www.salientimages.com/art2.htm  - my opinion is that he's way too wordy about what he's doing: |  "The computational realization of gesture in my practice entails the construction of of a spatial field of action."  - from that and the pictures it's pretty clear that he's just iterating points in a vector field (which doesn't lead to fractal behaviour since the behaviour doesn't repeat at all scales).   Still, the colouring in particular is pretty inventive, and I'm wondering what software he uses to do the rendering.

this kind of potential field could easily be added to an ifs renderer, which would be quite interesting ineed.

[Nahee_Enterprises]

    Interesting link, thx Paul  
    ....my opinion is that he's way too wordy about what he's doing  
    .....and I'm wondering what software he uses to do the rendering.
    This kind of potential field could easily be added to an IFS renderer,
    which would be quite interesting indeed.

Yes, I thought the images were interesting as well, and wondered myself about the software involved.  But in the email response I got from Thomas, he seemed to purposefully avoid mentioning the name.  He also specifically stated:
    "There is no fractal math or algorithmic process involved in my work.  I have
      consciously avoided that approach for particular reasons of my over-familiarity
      with the look and limitations of fractal imagery."

I am still pursuing the topic with him through emails and hope to get further information that might really be useful.

[lycium]

maybe i'm reading too much into this, but...

all the programmers here can make "spaghetti in a box", and also render it on their own. so we like to credit for it, and mention it explicitly; that he doesn't and isn't forthcoming more or less implies it's a soft spot he's not so keen to discuss... why? because he makes a big deal of himself - truly i've never seen someone write their name in such a huge/bold font as he does on his page :|

compare to this, where the guy is not only humble, but more than happy to discuss his methods: http://rgba.scenesp.org/iq/ (a demoscener friend, who won last year's mandelbrot art thingy)

[lycium]

oh and regarding that charming comment he made, i had some difficulty understanding it at first; here's a rough translation that makes a lot more sense to me:

before: "I have consciously avoided that approach for particular reasons of my over-familiarity with the look and limitations of fractal imagery."
after: "I have consciously avoided fractal methods because I don't have the imagination to program anything more than Mandelbrot and Julia sets and can't write 3D renderers."

talk about picking your fights... instead of pushing the boundary with which he is oh-so-familiar, he'll just damn the whole field. too bad for us eh?