Grain pictures is a collaboration with the musician and visual artist Richard Scott, who is interested in how scientific concepts such as order, disorder and ergodicity manifest in visual art.
Richard’s Grain pictures are discrete interference patterns, created by overlaying binary sequences. These drawings are painstaking work which involves a lot of counting. We write programmes to automate pattern generation, allowing Richard to screen through trial pictures very quickly. The patterns are then drawn by hand or screen printed. In these patterns of order and disorder we see grain boundaries, point defects, quasi-crystals and more.
Richard has presented this work at the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, the Midlands Art Centre, Birmingham City University and Anglia Ruskin University. From October 2019 until January 2020 Grain pictures exhibited at the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum, The Row Gallery and Leamington Spa Art Gallery and Museum as part of the Coventry Biennial.
The associated code is available in a Github repository and there was a web app (now defunct) to create your own patterns.
Left: Hand-drawn Grain picture; Right: Screen-printed Grain picture
SDF is an electronic music collective. Established in Newcastle and now distributed around the UK, SDF currently comprise of Adam Parkinson, Oliver Marchant and myself. Our fourth album Broken Glass was released with Lost Map records and has featured on BBC6 Music.
Singing Materials explores the sonification of phonon data and how this can be used for electronic music performance. The project team also include Prof. Paul Vickers and Ify Nwabuokei. This project is at an early stage, with software development happening here and here.