Spatial Cylinders

Spatial Cylinders, version 2.0, 2023.

Around 1975 I created a plotter art piece by the same name. The medium was very primitive then. It was a simple piece where I joined two overlying circles of points together with straight lines. The attempt was to create a primitive form of volume (3D); to break out of the flat plane of plotter paper. I rendered them in a matrix format (a tessellation of sorts).

Conceptually the new version of a cylinder is like taking a book and rotating it's covers around it's spline to touch. I use a wire-frame approach, rotating a random number of slices (pages of the book) around a vertical axes. I store each cylinder as 3D coordinates in arrays and manipulate their data with scaling, rotation and perspective equations. I use a contrived multi-axis rotation scheme rather than pure randomness. I translate each cylinder into its place in the display matrix similar to the original work.

The original version was black line on a white background. Here, I render each cylinder in a random color (again contrived, the overall the color scheme follows an analogous color paradigm) and I add transparency so as to allow you to see the various pages. The overlapping transparent planes amplify a cylinders' color affording a pleasant result.