The Story of This Website

This website started with an implementation of Turtle Graphics. This is intended to be used by people who want to learn how to program and how to do computer graphics. Turtle graphics provides an easy and interactive way to program. This program uses JavaScript which is the language built into almost all browsers.

But what to draw? There are a lot of places for inspiration and collection of various examples. Advertising and graphic design are everywhere. Simpler designs using straight lines and simple angles are easier to reproduce. A lot of inspiration can be found on Wikipedia. On a visit to the local art museum in Columbia, SC. There was a chromed figure, Saida, that was mesmerizing. It was just a set of different sizes squares placed about a central point. Although all of the lines of the piece were straight, they appears to be curved. This piece led me to the artist, Stephen Neifeh, and his work which mixes western and Islamic traditions of art.

Most of the Neifeh pieces were fairly easy to reproduce with Turtle Graphics, except for his Saadiyat and Topkapi series. It was easy to see that there were patterns and repetition, but it was not easy to reproduce. The soluting came accidentally on a visit to another website, thingiverse.com. A search for game pieces to print with a 3-D printer reveald some Girih tiles that had the same figures as the Saadiyat and Topkapi series. The complex strapping pattern was built fairly effortlessly using tilings of five simple polygons.

Turtle graphics was able to drew some of the Girih tilings, but it was overcome with complexity as the number of tiles was increased. The Islamic concept behind Girih is that its patterns repeat into infinity. A new tool was required that focused on laying the tiles and not in moving to the next tile. Stefan Hintz has created an app, Girih Polygon Pattern Design, for Macintosh computers. This is a better program for creating Girih than the Girih design program here, but it is commercial and works only on Macintosh platforms. It has some interesting variations on drawing the tiles and the strapping, so it serves as an inspiration. A free tool was desired.

Another visit to the Columbia Museum of Art revealed a 15’ x 60’ three panel Sol Lewitt wall drawing. To see art with all of your eye makes the art more infinite. This led to an exploration of LeWitt and conceptual art.

The Reardan history pages are an ongoing research project into the past of my home town.