Isaiah Fleischer – Geometric Abstraction

Inspired By: Dulles (Capital)  by Sarah Morris

I saw many interesting pieces while I was browsing through the Artist Inspiration page on the Canvas site, but Dulles (Capital) by Sarah Morris stood out. The illusion of 3D space represented only with rectangles and an abundance of white space appealed to me. It was interesting to see how she could convey so much depth with so little.

Dulles (Capital) – Sarah Morris

Her work seemed perfect for Max, as it only required planes and lines translated and rotated within a grid. In order to achieve multiple states I chose to give the user four options for the level of negative space in the piece. Further, I included an option to have just yellow and blue planes visible, which leads very nicely into the option with all planes showing. It is as if the yellow and blue planes bleed into each other to fill the negative space with their composite color, green.

I’m sure there is a better way to make such a large number of repeating shapes, but without prior experience in Max I couldn’t devise an elegant solution. I coded a module that created one plane, and then copied it numerous times to make all the planes. Each grouping is controlled by a common color and scale, allowing me to control all of them at once. In order to turn each color on and off I simply made the scale 0 or 0.1. Further, I adapted some of the code from the Jitter tutorial to create one set of lines in the grid. Next, I copied the code with a rotation and translation to get the two other dimensions. Finally, the various bangs simply interact with one of the scale factors to form combinations of visible colors. 

Bangs to control the states.

Yellow and Blue. They bleed into the negative space to form the green planes.

Blue planes.

Yellow planes.

Green planes.

Code to generate the grid lines.

The code to create the planes.