• The Brief
  • Let's Complicate Things

What happens when you combine patterns, randomisation and emergent properties of materials and data?

South Australian artist Kate Little creates artworks that draw from mathematics, textiles and music to offer new ways of thinking about relationships between humans, nature and technologies.

Check out the link to emergence here.

There are a selection of works along the corridor that have been created using the Hilbert Curve, a continuous fractal space-filling curve.

What does that mean? Space filling means you can think of it like trying to drape a string that covers all the squares of a grid without crossing over itself. And fractal means if you zoom in and look closely at a section of a higher-order curve, the pattern you see looks just the same as itself.

This is the basic U shape of a Hilbert curve in a 2 x 2 grid.

If you double this to a 4 x 4 grid, each containing the U shape that passes through all four quadrants of the grid. 

This is a recursive pattern that can repeat and repeat giving you patterns like this:

These have applications in spatial databases and mapping, and also in graphics processing.

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