Mark Stock

University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

Droplet #7

Digital Art

In our observance of fluid motion in nature certain shapes and patterns most often come to mind: the thin wispy structure of an old cloud, a candle flame, roiling smoke from a smokestack, or wavy mirages in a pot of water soon after we turn the heat on. These patterns, and their manifestations, are still multilayered physical systems, with the effects of viscosity, inertia, density difference, combustion, heat transfer, surface tension, reflection, and refraction all playing a role. Removing all effects, save inertia and density discontinuities, creates shapes of the kind seen in "Droplet #7."

Creation of the image in "Droplet #7" required several pieces of specialized software. The primary piece was a fluid-dynamics code, written for my doctoral research, which tracks the motion of density interfaces. For aesthetic reasons, a spherically-symmetric geometry defining an unstable density discontinuity served as the initial shape. The program solved for the evolution of this sheet until it contained an adequate amount of detail. By then, the geometry had increased in complexity enough to require around one million triangles to define it. After an ideal frame and angle were chosen, the geometry was run through another program to generate the x-ray-like image.

Sunset on Squares

Digital Art

The primary element in "Sunset On Squares" is the simple nested repetition of form on several different scales, commonly called a fractal. With only a few levels of recursion, the object appears ordinary; but it grows more and more interesting as the basic shape of 14 of 27 cubes is repeated within itself.

By itself, the geometry is simply a large collection of right angles and flat planes, but with an appropriately-chosen view, a deep collage of non-square shapes such as triangles, hexagons, and circles begins to appear. It is an extremely wide angular fisheye view from the center of the assembly that manifests these patterns and their associated symmetries.

No construction method or camera could create the image in "Sunset on squares," but three thousand bytes of scene description code and two weeks of processor time were successful. The basic 14-cube structure is nested in 7 levels of recursion to simulate the existence of 105 million cubes. The final scene was rendered at a very high resolution and used Radiance's undersampled global illumination method to simulate the influence of multiple-bounce light interreflection.

Mark Stock is a programmer, researcher, and artist who explores the boundary between the real and the unreal, as it pertains to fluid dynamics, computer simulation, and visual perception. He has been producing art for six years and has had work appear in juried exhibitions for four.

Mark had his start with simulation and visualization programming Moire patterns and particle dynamics routines on the Commodore 128. His interests in mathematics and programming followed him through high school and led him to acquire degrees in engineering at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he is currently pursuing a PhD in Aerospace Engineering.

Mark's interest in photography led him to discover computer graphics as an undergraduate at U-M. He spent several years exploring different techniques and tools for creating virtual images until he inadvertently discovered the hidden beauty of fluid simulation when he rendered som eparticularly buggy program results. He then decided to continue to write simulation software and he currently uses those tools for his work, both artistic and scientific.