The artwork (un)known is an intermedia approach on folk iconography/patterns of the craft of silversmithing, in the region of Epirus (Greece), that combines visual arts, folklore and creative coding within a conceptual context, paralleling the way in which tradition and the Fibonacci sequence develop.
Just as tradition is inherited from the previous one, evolved by the current one and passed on to the next generation, so Fibonacci is a sequence of numbers in which each number is the sum of its two predecessors. Tradition, however, is a social phenomenon, as it originates and evolves through the collective life of people, so it does not operate in the strictness of numbers, but as a pattern of interactions. With this as a starting point, code was written which, through Processing, distorts an image depicting a digital collage of a rabbit. The generative distortion of the image is choreographed by the spiral logic of the Fibonacci sequence, using the spiral not just as a shape, but as a kind of “invisible hand” that guides the distortion. The distortion is brought to life through randomness and noise (included as parameters in the code), aiming towards a more realistic system where order (Fibonacci, tradition) and chaos (noise, social upheaval) interact. The rabbit symbolizes the entry into an absurd world of mystery and confusion, where curiosity becomes the driving force, keeping in line with the intermedia artistic approach, as it is visually juxtaposed with a slideshow of details of elements of folk-art iconography.
The code was written by vikochico (Victor Minas Karamanlis).