tesh-Interruptions

Observations on Vera Molnar’s Interruptions:

  1. The artwork is square
  2. The lines are black and all of the same size
  3. There are several hundred of these thin lines in the piece
  4. The lines are packed densely but leave enough whitespace between to read each individual line
  5. The field of lines leaves a border of white around it and patches of whitespace within the field
  6. These patches look almost rectangular or polygonal
  7. The lines are laid out with their center points almost on a regular x,y grid, but they are moved slightly off (aside from where the whitespace is)
  8. The orientation of the lines are random but seem to be about their centerpoints
  9. The background of the piece is a light grey or offwhite color
  10. The field of lines in this piece is about 60 by 60 lines

I struggled a lot with this piece, not necessarily from technical difficulty but difficulty in an almost artistic sense. I was able to set up a grid to base the lines off of and generate a field of randomly oriented lines which looked similar to Vera Molnar’s art, but the main difficulty came with adjusting values just so in order to get the right look. I was struggling to find the right settings for offsets and adjustments in regards to the Perlin noise function p5 has to help generate the whitespace patches within the piece. I still think they are too straight and rectangular in mine!
I am amazed at how Molnar was able to change values and tweak settings to get it to such an organic level when she originally created this work almost 50 years ago. It really speaks to the level of craft involved in programmatic and generative art, just like in any other medium or art form.