Drawing circles

Bridget Riley describes the relationship of her work to computers as “superficial and misleading”. I therefore saw this as a call to action to attempt to replicate one of her works with code. I chose “White Discs” (1963) because I found relief in circles after painting so many stripes.

My algorithm defines a grid of possible circle centers and then identifies the neighbors of each center. A radius is selected from a weighted list of four values (A, B, C, and 0) so that the radius does not equal that of any of its neighbors, except for 0, which is allowed to repeat.

The more strict the neighbor definition became, such as considering eight neighbors as opposed to four, the more a regular pattern began to form. The pattern breaks up near the edges, where there are fewer neighbors and thus more freedom.

Iteration 1: four neighbors

Iteration 2: four neighbors again

Iteration 3: eight neighbors

I wondered if my algorithm captured the basic qualities of the original, or if something was lost. What are the human-made nuances that Riley holds dear? Is it the placement of the small dots in relation to the large ones? Or the subtle forming of diagonals across the picture? I’m not quite sure. Riley says, “You can’t experience those black-and-white paintings if you only count and measure their elements instead of seeing what they do.”

I think she underestimated the potential of counting and measuring. We are in another time now, where new-ish computational methods (and some not-new math) are pretty good at seeing and devising rules about how parts comprise wholes, likely better than human intuition. So what’s left for us? Do we still need our eyeballs tickled? Is this work actually about the performance or experience of seeing, or is it more about answering the call to be seen?