Hidden Geometries at The Internet Archive

A 5-MINUTE TALK AT TIAT 12 (The Intersection of Art & Technology)

Scott Snibbe’s five-minute talk at San Francisco's TIAT 12 (The Intersection of Art & Technology). The Internet Archive's grand auditorium was filled to capacity with people who came to enjoy ten five-minute artist’s talks. Scott spoke about his new Hidden Geometries series of software art and paintings exploring the geometry that underlies Tibetan Buddhist thangka paintings.

FULL VIDEO INCLUDING ALL TALKS

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

 This is just to calm you down after the last presentation. This is a thangka painting. It's a thousand year old tradition. Some of you may have seen these at the Asian Art Museum or in someone's bedroom. This one is an image of the Buddha. What's interesting about this tradition is that the purpose of these paintings is not to convey cultural or historical information, but to induce an experience in the viewer, an altered state of consciousness.

I started studying this form of painting 22 years ago, and the first thing I learned was that you draw a grid that underlies each one of these figures. And the grid is different depending on the different - they call them deities - but they're actually enlightened beings. They're humans that became enlightened. And so I was really fascinated by that.

A lot of my artwork, for any of you who know me, deals with geometry. So two years ago I started working on a series of art based just on the geometry that underlies these images.

And so what I do is I would take that underlying geometry that's normally hidden - that's why I call the series Hidden Geometries. And you create an abstract composition with that.

This is the historical Buddha, Shakyamuni Buddha, the Buddha that lived 2,500 years ago and attained enlightenment.

This is Tara, White Tara, who's the embodiment of female power, a wonderful deity, probably the most popular deity in Tibetan Buddhism.

I'm a Buddhist, by the way. I've been practicing Tibetan Buddhism for about 25 years.

But quite soon I wanted to get out of the computer and be more tactile. And so these are ink on clay. I was trying to get back to very natural, old materials. This is called Protector of the World, which is another name for White Tara, female power.

And then these are the more painterly type pieces. These were all developed inside the computer with algorithms that take that geometry and then filter a very low resolution image of a thangka. This is actually what I do. I take the thangka painting and then filter it to very low resolution, and then I sample it.

So the first one I did in Blender was a kind of of handcrafted sampling. What I was trying to get at was the experience of someone when you're meditating on the deity, which what my teacher told me - when you meditate on the Buddha - is that you're supposed to visualize it very perfectly and clearly in your mind, above your head.

But actually what you see is very fuzzy. And so I wanted to convey that idea of what a person actually sees when they're meditating, which is fuzzy and changing and dynamic. It's an image, a static image that conveys something changing. The other important thing is that there's an idea in Vajrayana Buddhism, tantric Buddhism, of these three bodies that we all have and that you get in touch with through meditation.

There's your mental body, your mind body, which is this immaterial, and there's your physical body. But then there's the thing in between. They call it the Sambhogakaya, the energetic body. I'm using it right now with speaking, with creativity, with sensuality, with exercise, all these ways of connecting the mind to the physical body.

So this is one that I made based on Tara, that embodiment of female power. This one's particularly special because my wife's stepmother was really instrumental in helping to resettle the Tibetan people in Minneapolis. She died 10 years ago and at her memorial service, a Tibetan gave a thangka of white Tara to her husband and he gave it to me. Because he's not a Buddhist, so he said, I think you'll enjoy this more than I do, a few years later. And so I sampled that and made this image from it.

This is the program I use. After that first one, I wrote my own program. I call it Buddha Grids and what it does is it lets you take an image... when the samples are just on the center, is just a blurry image. So then it lets you offset them, do that algorithm that I did by hand now, kind of mechanized. And then I can offset it.

So I can either get very far or very close from the central point. But when it's randomized, it doesn't look particularly good. So then each image I can then paint. I can, within the rules of the system, I can modify it until I get these illusions of layering and so on.

This is more fractal. There's this idea of the universe in every atom they talk about in Tibetan Buddhism; or Indra's Net in Hinduism, where every particle of space reflects every other. Which actually is true about the universe, right? Every point in space feels the gravitational influence of every other.

These are dynamic pieces, wall pieces on screens.

This was the first one called The One Gone Beyond. And this repeats in sessions that are about eight minutes over two hours. So it's kind of like a meditation retreat where you do these sessions.

What I tried to convey in each of these are particular types of meditation. There are many different types of meditation in Tibetan Buddhism.

This one's about concentration, meditations that are meant to help you concentrate.

And so these pieces are actually meant to induce the experience. Just like those thousand year old devotional images, they're meant to induce a meditative experience in the viewer, but a particular type of meditation.

This is called the One Gone Beyond, which is another name for the Historical Buddha.

This one is a very different type of meditation. It's called the One Gone Beyond Watching Thoughts. This is the type of meditation where you don't empty your mind, but you actually let anything pass through it and just watch and observe it.

And so I was trying to convey what that type of meditation feels like and maybe also induce that in the viewer in the same way. So this gradually kind of complicates through that same geometry, but in that way of articulating, observing every thought.

And then this last one, you can barely see it move. It moves about at the pace of a shadow. And it's timed to the rotation of the Earth. It's the first of these pieces I made that isn't predictable. Whenever I turn it on, it's different and it will never be the same. I use a ratio of irrational numbers to calculate the gradients.

And so the type of meditation I was trying to get at with this, which is also the White Tara. Is that meditation where you actually become that being, that's the Vajrayana or tantric Buddhism in which you actually become that type of enlightened body.

So thank you very much.