Max Cooper + Samad Khan - Movement Maps

Max Cooper - Leaving This Place

Max Cooper: I was writing this piece of music during a recent period of isolation when I needed some escapism, and I became totally lost in the piece of music, forgetting to sleep or eat for long periods of time while I worked on it. For the visual project I was drawn to the work of Jazer Giles, which for me, has a beautiful balance of computational and organic form. It's rich with structure and rules, but also full of a sort of wrongness that signifies art from a human. And it's also deep with sub-systems and details, there's a lot hidden in there as there is with the music, if you're interested to delve into it with headphones and high res. I was interested to hear from Jazer that the system itself mirrors these aesthetic elements via the source of two algorithms at play being alternatively activated by colour and angle structures. One algorithm works a little like a cellular automata, building subsequent pixels based on surrounding pixels to yield simple repetitive structures, while the other algorithm uses a Physarum slime mould type rules algorithm for a more random exploratory growth aesthetic - the overall system being a balance of these two worlds, and a visual interplay of life and computation. Many thanks for supporting our work with your reading, watching and listening, and hopefully I'll see you at a gig sometime where we can cover the walls in this beautiful visual work. Jazer Giles: This video began as a discussion with Max about emergent properties and our creative processes. We found common inspiration around building large forms/sounds/landscapes from iterating small rules/rhythms/shapes. You can hear this in the way Max builds densely layered sonic spaces inside your headphones, and you can see it in the video when small geometric structures combine and sort themselves into large forms. Making this video I was inspired by the meticulous spatialization of Max's music and the way it articulates his process to the listener. In that spirit, I attempted to approach one thing from many directions, and created the animations for this video using a single algorithm, while varying the parameters and starting conditions and recording the results at a range of scales; where you can see individual pixels to zoomed-way-out. There are two primary steps to the algorithm for every pixel. First, the current pixel is sampled, along with three nearby pixels in a direction stored as an angle in the alpha channel. The current pixel's color values are either preserved or replaced by the other sampled pixels based on logic in colorspace. The logic varies; luminosity comparisons, reflect or refract functions, absolute differences. The second step modifies the rotational angle based on luminosity comparisons of the sampled pixels, similar to a Physarum growth simulation. This feedback system is seeded with varying initial conditions such as blocks of color, images, and smooth gradients, and the initial angle of rotation is set as the luminosity.