Max Cooper - Penrose Tiling

"The new visual project involved finding different ways of visualising the aesthetics of the infinite. One chapter approached the idea via Penrose Tiling, an aperiodic tiling system developed by Roger Penrose in the 1970’s, which can tile an infinite plane without falling into simple repeating units as with normal (periodic) tiling systems. This idea of the link between non-cyclical structure and the infinite was also central to the the processes of improvisation used throughout. But for this piece I wanted to mirror the tiling regime more explicitly. I opted to do that by having all loop lengths corresponding to prime numbers. This yielded the equivalent behaviour musically, where at least for the length of the track (and for two weeks or so if it had gone on playing), there would be no exact repeat of any bar - loops without loops. The feeling of this idea was a nice rhythmical syncopation which I applied to some live instrumentation with the sansula to begin with, and built more and more layers of tight percussion around as the piece progressed." -Max Cooper