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Gorge, a backyard exploration, is a collaboration of visual artist Bill Botzow and theoretical physicist Frank Peseckis. In some ways it is an extrapolation of their 1996 project Process, which similarly concerned itself in part with complex natural phenomena. Started in late January 1997, the collaboration continued through the year.
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 Ice  Water  Green  Dry  Leaves Succession An mpeg video (1501k) of the transformation cycle through the final images of the gorge sequences |
Gorge begins with digital photographs taken at various times of the year in and around a shale ravine in Frank's woodland backyard. The collaborators explore the changes within the gorge by digitally transforming these sets of images, using techniques that are built upon methods they developed in earlier collaborations.
In Process they traced a series of changes single image by single image. Here they examine the change of a multitude of things as a multitude. The multitude begins as a set of images of objects and processes to be found in this backyard gorge. It proceeds through a sequence of transformations, always as a unified set of images. The transformations are inspired by ideas from the mathematics of sets, groups, matrices, and other similar mathematical objects, particularly as they relate to the contemporary theoretical physics of chaos, turbulence, and complex dynamical processes. The initial sets consist of five collections of eleven photographs. Each collection captures one phase of the changes of the gorge through a year: the ice of mid-winter, the rush of water in the spring thaw, the lush green of late spring, the dry intensity of summer, the cast-off leaves of autumn. Botzow and Peseckis build an analogous sequence of changes in the images they create from these photographs, by a series of mathematical transformations designed to induce these large collections step by step to display their essential features. The first transformation of these collections is suggested by the interactions that are the source of complex change. The chaos or turbulence of change arises from three or more elements of a system feeding upon one another, multiplying the effects of one another, till they lose their separate identities and evolve into something newly multifaceted. Analogously, Botzow and Peseckis look at multiplicative combinations of three and four images at a time. They create new images by multiplying the numerical color measures at every point in three or four source images simultaneously. This forms very large sets of multiplicatives, whether triples or quadruples. To focus these collections, they select subsets of them, the members of each new subset chosen to be as distinct from one another as possible. The mathematical rule that guides the selection is that the images in each subset share, between any pair, no more than one of the original source photographs in the triple or quadruple that formed them. From each set of triples this produces sets of seven images, and from the quadruples come sets of three images. The new sets of seven and three respectively become the basis for further transformations. There proceeds a mathematical chain of these sets. At each stage of the sequence the new set is smaller in the number of its elements, till at last the sets reduce to having but a single member which in some way now exemplifies the entire set of eleven photographs which were its origins. This is done for every phase of the gorge. And then the phases themselves are grouped and transformed. The images on this page are links to these sequences and transformations. They exhibit the digital imagery created from the gorge together with remarks by the collaborators which provide some insight into their methods and choices. |
