AutoMata: Red Field

Why I made this

A result becomes a cause

What keeps me watching automata is causality. Each state is the result of the world just before it, and becomes the cause of the world that follows. That can keep going. I find something beautiful in this: a field that begins with random differences can gradually find a shared rhythm. Nobody has to tell the whole thing what shape to become.

In Red Field, circles keep changing through their relationships with their neighbors. Sometimes they seem to agree; sometimes that agreement breaks apart. I want to keep watching how order appears inside that change. But I also wonder about the other side of it. What is happening in me when these small changes begin to look beautiful?

Lines and perception

Where does a line exist?

A perfect straight line is a strange thing. In geometry, it has length but no thickness. A line drawn on paper always has some thickness, some unevenness. Still, I see a line immediately. My visual system has already done something before I have time to think about it.

Hubel and Wiesel’s 1962 experiments showed that cells in the cat’s visual cortex respond selectively to edges and bars at particular angles. A line is already something the nervous system is sensitive to. Wiesel’s later account of visual development describes both innate organization and the importance of early visual experience.

This makes me think of Plato’s Forms, though I am borrowing the idea quite freely. Perhaps something like the “idea” of a line lives in the machinery of seeing. A chair or an apple seems to involve more of what I have learned about the world; a line feels closer to the conditions that let me see anything in the first place. That is a thought I want to follow, even though these experiments do not establish that we are born with complete concepts of lines, circles, or squares.

Looking at modernism

Going further into seeing

That thought brings me back to modernist painting. In Modernist Painting (1960), Clement Greenberg described each art examining what belonged to its own medium. For painting, the flat surface was central to this idea of medium purity. I find myself taking that question inward: if a painter keeps looking into what painting can do, might they also reach deeper into the way they see? This is where my own reading begins.

Mondrian comes to mind first. His straight lines and blocks of color make me think of a world filling with manufactured things: windows, streets, buildings, repeated right angles. I wonder if part of their attraction came from that change in the shapes surrounding him. His abstraction had already developed in Europe; MoMA traces it through his trees, façades, and experiments with Cubism. So industrialization is my association, not a full explanation of his work.

Still, in Broadway Boogie Woogie, the connection feels especially close. MoMA describes the painting through New York and the music he loved there. Those small blocks produce a rhythm across a grid. I keep coming back to how much movement can happen within such a limited set of forms.

With Barnett Newman, I feel that movement inward even more strongly. In Onement I (1948), a vertical band, later called a “zip,” runs through the field of color. Newman spoke of revelation. Looking at it, I feel he has gone down into the act of seeing and stayed with that one encounter. Research on the oblique effect finds that people can judge horizontal and vertical orientations more accurately than diagonal ones under certain conditions. That gives me an interesting connection, but it does not explain the painting’s force.

I feel something related in Rothko’s color and Pollock’s tangled marks. Rothko spoke about basic human emotions, so calling his work pure color would miss too much. And the fractal analysis of Pollock’s paintings by Taylor, Micolich, and Jonas came in 1999, long after the paintings themselves. Still, I imagine these artists going further into their own responses, toward something that happens before I can put it into words. “Going down” is the phrase that feels right to me.

Circles and repetition

Following the dots inward

Then there is the circle. Fantz and Miranda’s 1975 study found that newborns looked longer at patterns with curved outer contours than straight ones under controlled conditions. I keep thinking about that small preference, appearing so early in life. How early does a shape begin to matter to us?

I have thought about Yayoi Kusama’s dots this way for a long time. Her work moves across painting, sculpture, installation, and performance, far beyond the boundaries of a single medium. Her personal history matters, of course. Yet I also wonder whether her repeated return to dots involved a search inward, something I feel in the modernist painters: following a form because it keeps touching something in her own perception.

I cannot know that from looking at the work. What I can do is listen to her words. In a statement reproduced by the High Museum of Art, Kusama connects dots with the sun and moon, and describes them coming together into movement and infinity. Her idea of self-obliteration also lets the individual become part of a much larger whole. I find a connection here between the repeated shape and the feeling of losing a fixed boundary around oneself.

That is what I wanted to try with this piece: give dots a small logic of self-organization, then let them keep changing together. Every dot belongs to a world made by the previous moment. As I watch, I am also looking for a rhythm that seems to speak directly to something inside my own head. I can write the rules that change the field. I am still trying to understand why I want to keep looking.

While I was carrying these thoughts around, before I had put them into writing, I heard that Yayoi Kusama had died. May she rest in peace.

Technical TL;DR

A few rules, running live

The field starts with randomized values. Each circle updates its color, size, position, and contour using its own state and its neighbors’ states. The next step is calculated from the same snapshot for every circle. Everything runs live in your browser. Use the launch link above to open the piece in its own tab.