(^) been in terra incognita, intellectually, so I
certainly couldn’t tell you with a straight face
that I always ‘knew’ where I was going; that’s
for sure. But I had some ideas and insights, and
combined them with the kind of single-minded
focus we computer geeks are famous for and the
persistence of an I-don’t-know-what. So, as the
years have gone by, I’ve been able to reveal
more and more of the beauty that’s inherent in
this parallel universe we’re constructing/
revealing with MojoWorld. It’s kind of like I
glimpsed the Promised Land in my mind’s eye,
and I saw how to get there.
And it’s taken years to fulfil on that vision, years
filled with a lot of engineering work, to get from
here to there. In fact, technically, it couldn’t
have happened any sooner than the new
millennium, at least not on your home computer.
Heck, MojoWorld is still beyond the capacity of
the vast majority of home computers. On the
other hand, they just don’t sell computers that
aren’t up to it, any more.
Huw: You used to be an art student?
KM: Yes, once upon a time, long before I got
into computers, I was an art student. Artistically,
my lexicon has always been landscapes and
abstracts. There’s something in a beautiful
landscape that attracts me in exactly the same
back-brained way as a beautiful woman does —
it just feels right, and calls to me. I love
landscape painting and photography, and vistas
in the great outdoors.
I ditched my art major early on because it was
too much like work. The sciences seemed easier;
at least there you know when you’ve got it right.
Then I took a break for five years to be a Santa
Cruz hippie. Having exhausted that particular
line of inquiry, I went back to college. I went
into computer science half-heartedly, simply
because that’s where the jobs were, and
because I’d taken an aptitude test way back in
high school that said I should be a computer
programmer, a forest ranger, or an interior
decorator, in that order. Little did I know that I’d
become a bit of each!
After a few years I got into computer graphics,
fell in love with it and never looked back. Then
came my lucky break: I was hired by Benoit
Mandelbrot, the father/inventor/discoverer of
fractal geometry — which is the key to
MojoWorld — to be his programmer in the Yale
math department, helping to implement some
algorithms he was working on to include rivers in
fractal terrains. This was my first brush with
fractal terrains.
I’d only been at Yale for a matter of weeks when
Benoit left for trip, having first given me
permission to “render unto Caesar, Caesar’s
due” (he really said that) while he was gone —
that is, to render some nice images of the
terrains I’d been coding up. He liked what I
came up with — “Nimbus” and “Lethe” — so
much that he pretty much kept me on as an
artist-in-residence for another six years, during
the second three of which I earned my PhD in
computer science for the techniques I was
inventing.
All the while I had a faculty office in the Yale
math department, for proximity to Benoit — so
that I could be his handy joeboy, forever
carrying his boxes of books about and doing
other such exotic tasks. Since I was stationed in
the math department for six years, and right-
hand man to the most famous living
mathematician, everyone assumes that I, too,
am a mathematician. Ask anyone in the Yale
math department — they’re clear I’m not!
“Lethe” is a rare case of an image I had in mind
before I made it. Almost all images I’ve made
have been discoveries from my explorations in
the early visualizations of the Mojoverse. I’m
more of a virtual photographer than a painter —
I record what I find, more than making it up
from scratch.
A little like Ansel Adams, if I may be so
presumptuous: He didn’t bulldoze the landscape
to get his compositions; rather, he had a keen
eye for beauty in Nature and the patience and
skill to catch it in its best light. So, to contradict
myself, yes, in a sense, it has always been about
the maths — or, more at, about an exploration
of the beauty inherent in them. Therefore, as a
rule, I’ve never done any post-processing of my
images in Photoshop or in any other way, other
than to composite in my signature in a corner.
ann
(Ann)
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