FIELD Michael

Mathematician

  "Michael Field is a mathematician from England who is currently working in Houston, Texas. Before Texas, he lived for about sixteen years in Sydney, Australia and several of his pictures are strongly influenced by the light and colors of the Australian Outback. Michael Field's mathematical work is in the area of chaos, symmetry and dynamics. In his pictures, he uses ideas based on his mathematical work as a way of expressing in an abstract way the underlying structure that lies within chaos and randomness.

http://nothung.math.uh.edu/~mike/

Technically speaking, the images I create are realizations of invariant measures of symmetric chaotic dynamical systems. Although, at first sight, `Designer Chaos' seems an unlikely prospect, chaotic dynamics usually has great statistical regularity (a fact well known to those working in the measure theoretic and statistical aspects of smooth dynamical systems). My pictures represent that regularity. All but one of the pictures on display were created using deterministic dynamical systems defined on a 2-torus. The remaining picture -- Fire Quilt -- was constructed using a random dynamical system defined on a 2-torus.

Symmetry imposes a unity and harmony on a design. The particular symmetry type used in the design can also have a psychological and physiological impact. Four of the pieces on display -- SandStone Quilt, Fire Quilt, Armies Of The Night and Enduring Illusions -- are "two-color" repeating patterns. For these patterns, symmetries of the pattern either preserve or reverse colors. Two color designs often lead to intriguing visual ambiguities.

I use no commercial software in the creation of my pieces. Indeed, the challenge of achieving desired effects often results in my developing new algorithms (especially in the case of two-color designs where the coloring algorithms I have developed are quite complex). I control all stages of the design, coloring and printing process. The two miniature prints on display were done on an Epson printer using high quality papers and UltraChrome inks. The computation and design of the images often places extreme demands on the hardware, in particular on the graphics subsystem. I build and design the Linux computers that I use for my work.

My pictures have been exhibited in North America, Europe, Asia, Australia, Africa and South America."