Michael Trott

444 Digital Salon Artists’ Statements Like Whitman’s poem, X/Y Machina explores the nature of chromosomal identities, life/death, ambiguous bodies in contrast and detail. It is a sensual meditation on the body’s posture, expression, visceral functioning, homologies, and sex. The brain in its folds inside the skull-frame, Sympathies, heart-valves, palate-valves, sexuality, maternity, Womanhood, and all that is a woman, and the man that comes from woman. In X/Y Machina the body is recomposed as a series of intricate fragmented imagery—circuitry, joints, vectors, and suggestive human/mechanical bodily analogies: a pipe for intestines, wires for nerves. Like the machine, the transparent body is broken down into constituent elements, skeletons, organs, and morphed shapes. X/Y Machina is a bricolage where boundaries and distinctions are blurred, parts interchanged, and hybrids produced in an amalgam of springs, connected cylinders, and cables. In a recreation of transfigured Cartesian bodies, ephemeral digital materials are transformed into a stable configuration that defy the laws of organic structure and anatomy. X/Y Machina is a perceptual experience, a transsexual manifestation . It represents impulse and the complementary human desire to manipulate its own genetic heritage, a fantasy of revealing hidden corporeal mysteries and, at the end, the dream of creating the perfect body. X/Y Machina is part of the series Metamorphoses, a work in progress: an internal deconstruction of ideals and a redefinition of the Eve/female and Adam/male. Metamorphoses began with the work RE-Constructing EVE, exhibited at SIGGRAPH ’99. MICHAEL TROTT I am always creating pictures: over the past ten years, I have created roughly 10,000. They fall roughly into four groups, each determined by a different underlying process of design. Group I: The first group contains images for which I have a mental picture before sitting down at the computer. For these, I take my inspiration from some form in nature, from previous graphics I have generated, or simply from whatever comes to mind when relaxing. Once I have a clear mental image of an object to be visualized, creating the image is generally a straightforward exercise in programming—although one that, for the most intricate shapes, still takes many hours. After creating a basic surface such as a dodecahedron or a three-dimensional flower-like structure, my next step is to make it more visually interesting—by changing colors and surface properties, by replacing plane polygons with three-dimensional sheets, by punching various kinds of holes into the polygons (or shrinking the existing ones to allow one to look inside what had been a closed shape), by mapping patterns onto the surface, and by using a host of other such techniques. In some cases, I perform direct calculations to discover the constellations of light sources and surface colors needed for the desired effect—sometimes a pretty complicated issue. In other cases, I run the same picture a few dozen times overnight with randomly generated (within constraints) light positions, light colors , and surface color properties. The next morning, I select the ones I think look best—a sort of aesthetic counterpart of the Monte Carlo method. In some cases, I reseed the random number generator at the beginning of each image so that the picture can be reproducible; in other cases I don’t, virtually guaranteeing that the same graphic will never be generated again. Group II: That same capacity to generate random values can also be called into play in the creation of the objects themselves, as in the images of the second group. For examples, consider randomly generated mazes, a hexagonal Truchet pattern, or a densely packed arrangement of randomly worn stones. Although I have specified certain constraints when creating some of images in this group, by definition I never know how the realizations will finally appear. In many cases, one can only imagine some limiting values—with no randomness or only a very small amount, perhaps, or completely unconstrained. As a typical example, imagine a place covered with randomly chosen points in which each point is connected with its nearest neighbor. How will the resulting network look? Group III: Mathematics and physics are rich sources for interesting images. The third group...