emergent harmonies — eman makki

Machines and technology are ubiquitous in our lives and are also present in something as subjective as art. Generative art is created through an autonomous and procedural system. The current dialogue about generative art involves questions about originality and agency. How much creativity is derived from the program and how much from the programmer? What role does the designer play if they leave things to random chance? As a graphic designer exploring these questions, the aim of this thesis is to engage in the community of generative artists using design to add to the dialogue through the discoveries I make in my work. My goal is to expand the notion of how we define agency within our work.

Moiré This thesis began with explorations of visual phenomena such as moiré.
Patterns were created digitally and printed using a pen plotter.

Ballpoint pen on paper.
16 x 23”

Macro My interest in space phenomena led me to explore galactic dust or cosmic dust.

Galactic dust is all over space, it is extremely minuscule, yet it creates massive interplanetary dust clouds. Images of dust clouds on NASA are colorized and look stunning. I liked the idea of taking something as large and unscalable as a galactic dust cloud and then plotting it at a much smaller scale. I used the Hubble Space Telescope images, image traced them, and then plotted them with a pen plotter.

Ballpoint pen on paper.

5.82 x 8.26”

Meso Image mapping experiments of Earth using code and plotters.

Image mapping is translating pixel information from images into geometrical shapes. An image was input into Processing, the output is a series of images that were then plotted using a pen plotter. The original image is of an extratropical cyclone near Iceland as seen from space.

Ballpoint pen on paper.

8 x 10”

Micro The final project is a real time simulation that shows how many micrometeorites fall in Qatar over a period of 24 hours. The project was created with Processing, using Box2D, a physics engine that allows you to work with gravity, friction, and collision.

It is estimated that 4 tonnes of micrometeorites fall to Earth every day. That is equivalent to 40 billion micrometeorites a day. Current data states that 1 micrometeorite falls in every square meter. Qatar is 132km2, which means that 36,164 micrometeorites fall each day.

Thesis Book