Liam Taylor-West

Liam Taylor-West

Crossing Paths

64x64 LEDs, opal acrylic sheet and wooden frame

The phrase ‘crossing paths’ describes a meeting between two people, usually by chance.

This artwork began as a study of random movement. The first half of the piece is built around some simple rules, borrowed from the early computer game ‘Snake’, which was too obvious a visual reference to ignore:

·  A snake chooses a random direction for each new step but tries to avoid colliding with itself.

·  If ‘food’ of a certain colour appears, the snake will move towards the food and eat it.

·  Eating food makes the snake longer.

For a snake to get longer it must remember a growing list of the locations it has just visited. I imagined that each item of food was an event that the snake would encounter, and then carry with it on its journey. Just as the tail of the snake represents something for it to avoid in the future, so too do our past experiences have an impact on the decisions we make moving forwards. As more of the snakes’ histories are revealed, patterns begin to emerge-like a picture of society, showing regions where many snakes have been, and others where none have ventured. Individual movements become hidden within the complex map of interconnected pasts.

From this point, the snakes’ freedom becomes guided not only by their previous decisions, but also by external influences that set out which future paths are available to them. Increasingly intricate zones dictate the routes snakes must take to reach each other, and it is only through head-on collisions, by crossing paths, that the snakes are able to progress through the piece. This artwork reminded me that although crossing paths with someone in the present is a rare event, our pasts are deeply and continuously intertwined.

‘Crossing Paths’ was made possible thanks to the guidance and expertise of:

Lewis Sykes–Creative Technologist and Mentor

Edward Crane–Mathematician

Jack Stiling–Fabricator

The creation of the artwork was financially supported by:

Arts Council England

Ginkgo Projects

Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council

Liam Taylor-West is a composer and audiovisual artist. He was the recipient of the 2018 Ivors Composer Award in the Community or Educational Project category for The Umbrella and has had his music performed by ensembles such as the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, BBC Concert Orchestra, National Open Youth Orchestra and Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra. Liam’s artworks are built around the real-time interactions between large numbers of active elements, each following simple rules. They often feature random events, audience interaction, and aperiodicity.

Liam holds a Doctoral Degree in Composition from the Royal College of Music in London, where he studied with William Mival, Mark-Anthony Turnage, and Nico Muhly, amongst others. He is an advocate of the use of creative technology in composition and performance, and is a Resident at Watershed’s Pervasive Media Studio, in Bristol.

@liamtaylorwest

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Henna Koivusalo on ‘Crossing Paths’ by Liam Taylor-West

The snakes in Liam's piece move quasi-randomly over the whole space at first, and then start tracing the constructions of different famous fractal patterns, which slowly emerge from the chaotic movement. The term fractal doesn't have a rigorous mathematical definition, but it often refers to patterns created by iterating some deformation rule.

The first fractal pattern that the snakes reveal is the Sierpinski Carpet, discovered by Waclaw Sierpinski in 1916. Its construction is based on repeatedly making square holes in the middle of smaller and smaller squares, which, when continued forever, leads to an infinitely intricate lace pattern. The next fractal the snakes discover for us is the pattern of a space-filling curve known as the Hilbert curve. This pattern was first defined by David Hilbert in 1891, and has the property that, again when continued forever, becomes `infinitely wiggly' and fills the whole square. From the perspective of the snakes, it matters a great deal that some snakes that seem to be very close together, can take arbitrarily long to actually reach each other. This is due to their movement being restricted to the construction of the Hilbert curve.

The scientific process of finding and analysing new patterns is quite like the movement of the snakes -- they wiggle about and sometimes travel across with purpose, but it takes a while before any order arises from the chaos, before any answers emerge from confusion. But when it does, there's a tremendous beauty in the discovery. 

Henna Koivusalo is a Finnish mathematician working on fractal geometry and aperiodic order. She obtained her PhD from the University of Oulu (Finland) in 2013, and worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Universities of York (UK) and Vienna (Austria), before settling at Bristol on a permanent basis in the middle of the pandemic in 2020. She is now a Senior Lecturer at the School of Mathematics at the University of Bristol.