Some experiments with the Volume Select modifier in 3ds max (and with procedural modeling using the “stack”, in general) have led me to very unexpected results. Without intending it - but typically, in doing “generative” type of work - and over a million decisions re scale, modifiers (both the type and the order in the stack), data values in each modifier, I’ve landed at a form which strikes me as aesthetically & formally sound, complex and interesting - a form like a Rorschach test which evokes forms I’m personally drawn to, am seeking or are fixed on, even if I wasn’t aware of it. So in these images I see hints of and references to all sorts of things: Donatello’s drapery…fossae and foramina…blebs…muscle groups under skin…labial folds…I see hints of other, though different techniques: some forms look Mandelbulb-ous, others evoke cloth simulations, or forms created through mesh subdivision…
Generative work can be like marshaling a sublime and manifestly real observer effect: you know what “it” is when you find it. (But language conventions kind of hobble you, in talking about this stuff. To bring across the full force of the expression of that axiom, it would also be necessary to wrap the “know” and the “find” in scare quotes.) Historical Columbus gathered stores and crews and outfitted his ships to strike out for the East Indies—but instead hit upon the stopgap “West Indies,” a not-destination defined, haphazardly, in light of the intended destination. But a recent re-viewing of the end of Steven Soderbergh’s remake of Solaris, and reflection over the even more powerful end of Tarkovsky’s original, leads me to think of generative work/art/whatever in the terms of the traveler in those films: one marshals the tools/apparatus - the maps; the ships; or else the equations and the software - to move towards a certain objective (a rendered image or animation, say); and at the threshold of the nominal destination one discovers…oneself, rematerialized. An echo of one’s own urges, but in a foreign light…
