CHAOS
66" x 60" 24,857 brushstrokes 2010
Ants, Breadcrumbs, Stigmergy, Subsumptive Architecture and Complex Adaptive System Simulations
Kirby's initial impulse for this painting was to create an edgy, dark, intense experience. He wanted to continue evolving the fascinating complex adaptive behavior of the ants used in previous paintings and move them out of their 2D environment into a 3D world. In the 2D environment, their rules and tasks could only take the ants in certain directions. In Chaos, the ants' movement takes place for the first time in a complex 3D world.
Kirby created a three-dimensional cubic world 2,000 units wide x 2,000 high x 6,000 deep in the computer. This made the painting into a three dimensional space, an evolution in the ways Renaissance painters looked at perspective and made depth in their field.
For the ground Kirby generated a wire-mesh terrain, its hidden surfaces removed, and then painted with three layers of paint: a base layer of dark colors, a reflected-light layer, and an atmospheric glazed overlay layer. Each of these layers included a range of colors.
A scaled, clay model helped with the initial positioning for some of the timbers or uprights in the painting. Other timbers Kirby added stochastically, meaning they used probabilistic methods to solve problems, until the final composition emerged. The timbers were set in perspective, backlit and painted with heavy impasto strokes.
The foggy, misty sky and atmosphere using dark, ominous colors and lighting, called sfumato, comes from the realm of Renaissance techniques.
For the swirling energy at the center of the painting, Kirby wanted three-dimensional helical splines inside the mathematical cube. Next, Kirby inserted breadcrumbs in the cube along these spline lines for the ants to discover. Then he randomly dropped a colony of 10,000 ants in and allowed them to wander around three-dimensionally in this virtual world. When an ant found a breadcrumb, it could lay down a pebble. Other ants finding a pebble could lay down an adjacent pebble. To speed up the simulation of the ants, pheromones were added, an element which left a chemical trail, but which also decayed with time. Later, pebbles were converted into brush strokes representing swirling flashes of energy.
This piece moved through many domains to reach the canvas: model space, mathematical space, and several computer programming spaces. Still, though it is steeped in science, Chaos elicits emotion in the viewer and leaves a lingering trail of questions to keep the viewer intellectually engaged.
