Max Cooper - Cardano Circles

Warning: Contains flashing images Max Cooper: Recently I was asked to make a new live show based around Italy for a festival with that theme, so I delved into some historic Italian music and science for the Seme (Seed) project. One idea I came across was Gerolamo Cardano’s “Cardano Circles” system from around 1570. I love how it continuously turns straight lines into circles (it was part of early printing press technology). I wanted to present variants of this idea and started chatting to animator / coder Mario Carrillo about a video sequence, while I also came up with a musical interpretation. The music was an attempt at a simple beautiful system in line with the basic visual system we were working with. When the music was ready Mario took the visuals into beautiful new realms building on the initial idea, and we chatted a lot about how to connect his various visual systems to the Cardano Circles, and provide lots of opportunity for getting lost in some beautiful emergent abstraction. So yeah, that’s it for this one, I hope you enjoy it, thanks for having a look and a listen as always. Video artist: Mario Carrillo The concept known as “Cardano Circles”, named after the Italian mathematician Gerolamo Cardano, involves arranging circles in a straight line, each at varying angles, and traversing this alignment at different phases. Depending on the number of circles and the phase angle, this mechanism results in circular motion emerging from what would otherwise be linear movement.This simple and yet elegant concept evolved into a visual system designed to explore the aesthetic possibilities inherent in the idea. What if motion and color persist over time, giving rise to new emergent forms? What if varying the phase angle produces shapes beyond circles? And what if these circles were arranged in a grid rather than a Cardano system, numbering in the tens of thousands that swarm new patterns? The sequence unfolds, at times echoing the Cardano motif, to remind us of the foundational structure from which everything stems. Cardano Circles is a fusion of music, technology, and mathematics to craft a captivating abstraction of an age-old mechanical concept. It was a pleasure to work in synergy with Max as we blended our ideas throughout the process — we sincerely hope you find as much joy in experiencing it as we did in creating it.