Ubiquity & Ulam’s Spiral
In Ubiquity, 64 panels are arranged in a grid according to a mathematical pattern, Ulam’s Spiral. To generate Ulam's Spiral, label the center panel as 1 and continue to count up as you spiral around the grid, counterclockwise. Then black out the prime numbers. An implicit pattern presents itself; prime numbers seem to line up only in diagonals. Ulam stated that his spiral “appears to exhibit a strongly nonrandom appearance,” yet a pattern can’t be nailed down. Mathematicians still grapple with this elusive problem of discerning a pattern or algorithm to express the distribution of primes. Ulam’s Spiral also appears to be self-similar: the same sorts of patterns that arise in the 1-101 block appear when scaled out 100 times. Despite this, prime numbers are still only known to occur randomly.
Arranging my images according to Ulam’s Spiral reinforces this theme of inherent, yet non-apparent, pattern in my art. This notion exists in the natural world where everything seems to have been arbitrarily combined in this universe where so much seems so unlikely. However, through closer inspection, the physical world we live in is steeped in patterns. More curious is that these patterns exist at all scales, giving them a self-similar quality. Thereby, the world is a composition, rather than a combination, of elements and patterns.
