Analogue Art in a Digital World

Gravity: the mother of all supercomputers.

I’ve often been asked, by people who weren’t familiar with my techniques, what computer software I’d used to produce my harmonograms: they’d assumed that they were digital pieces. The truth is that the precision, beauty and complexity of a harmonogram are the product of nothing other than gravity.

To watch the twin-elliptic harmonograph in action is mesmerising. A fluid, apparently three-dimensional figure appears line by line in a continuous, precise and perfectly executed curve. The lines get closer (I say lines but, of course, there is only one line) and their interaction gets more complex as the harmonograph slows due to its inevitable friction. The resulting image is always unique and surprising: it is a graphic record of harmonic gravity.

The force of gravity is little understood, but it has existed since the beginning of time. It forms stars and galaxies, instructs the growth of plants and balances our ecosystem; it is what holds our world, and indeed the entire universe, together. Gravity is the analogue mother of all supercomputers.

I like to compare the force of gravity to a massive body of water. Picture yourself on a beach in California, paddling ankle-deep in the water of the Pacific Ocean; now consider that over six thousand miles away, also in the Pacific Ocean, is the Mariana Trench, which is over six miles deep. The pressure of the water column at the bottom of the Mariana Trench is over a thousand times greater than at sea level and would crush you beyond recognition: yet it’s the same water as that which laps around your ankles on the beach. In the same way, the force of gravity which is, at this very moment, sucking all nearby matter and light into the supermassive black hole at the centre of our galaxy is the same as that which holds the Earth in its orbit around the Sun, keeps you rooted to the ground, and guides the production of a harmonogram.

In a world which is so overwhelmingly computerised, digitised and impersonal, I am comforted by the thought that timeless forces of nature are capable of a level of organisational complexity and creativity which will never be surpassed by any supercomputer or artificial intelligence.