Patterns of Prosperity and Mindfulness

Patterns are an evergreen subject in human art and culture. From ancient temples to the epic 10 PRINT Commodore 64 code line, from tiles patterns to Games Universes, the repetition and variation of patterns produces astonishing and aesthetically pleasing results.

Our social interactions are often affected by patterns of good, bad or ugly human behaviors. Behavioral patterns shape our daily decisions, dark patterns try to influence our interaction with services, memes guide communication and create new patterns of social interaction.

For this series of pictures I created a relatively simple algorithm that produces varying patterns based on simple math functions of distance and periodicity, combined with Simplex noise, color gradients and some irony.

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Same as it ever was

For this series I broke with one of my rules to not use any input data.

I started with the idea of producing a series of „song pictures“ using the songs audio signal as input. I was surprised myself about some of the results when trying out different songs and tweaking some parameters, and also disappointed that some good songs didn’t produce a very satisfying outcome. While playing around with different songs I tried the famous Talking Heads song „Once in Lifetime“. I was struck so much by the prayer-like line „Same as it ever was“ that I chose it as the headline for this series.

For those interested in the technical details: the song duration is mapped to the screen size and visualized line by line from the upper left corner down to the bottom right corner of the screen. For the visualization an FFT analysis of the audio signal is used and the frequency distribution is mapped to 360 degrees and displayed using lines, rectangles or shapes. Colors variation depends on the audio signals amplitude and frequency mix.

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false breaks / fast moves

„False breaks are followed by fast moves“ is one of these market psychology rules that are mentioned from time to time in media reports about stock markets. It is one of the big traps stock market investors try to avoid by doing a lot of chart analysis on all kinds of indicators based on historical chart data in order to predict the future market behavior.

The funny thing is, that as many investors (and the algorithms they use for it) are doing the same or similar kind of analysis they come to the same or similar predictions. As a result, the future market behaves often (not always) like these predictions and so the result of their chart analysis becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Simply speaking, people with the same objective using the same or similar methods are able to predict the future based on historical data. Find the mistake.

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Those in the darkness

…you don’t see. The famous line from the Brecht/Weill song „Mack the knife“ crossed my mind when creating these pictures. What a wonderful song, worth listening these two performances, Louis Armstrong in English and Hildegard Knef in German.

And of course, if the subject is darkness another song is a must, Anne Clark – Our Darkness.

My dear friends, beware of those in the darkness!

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