For comments, questions, descriptions and prices:
KCKmosaics@aol.com

For other biographical information and essays, visit
www.KenKnowlton.com

I am particularly interested in producing mosaic portraits of mathematicians and scientists (especially of naturalists and ecologists). Or of founders or benefactors of science museums and aquariums (in the latter case, seashell mosaics, of course).

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Studies, ending with a BEP and an MS from Cornell and a Ph. D. from MIT, led to a career first in computer graphics, including a bit of art-technology collaboration, and later in computer-assisted art. Over the past 40 years (20 at Bell Laboratories) I've developed several experimental computer languages and techniques, starting with the earliest bitmap graphics system for moviemaking by computer.

My computer-assisted artwork since about 1980 has consisted mostly of actual or virtual mosaics, works deliberately made to be seen differently at different scales: from afar (or small), most of them are portraits, but at close range each is a vast array of seashells, dominoes, pottery shards, puzzle pieces, or other small objects or symbols. They sometimes combine a visage with the symbols/objects important to the person. They are also one of the ways of asking: Why do you "see" what you think you see? Why are vision, perception and meaning so puzzling and subjective?

Art?__ Computer Art? __Computer-Assisted Art?__

I write, or readapt, most of my computer graphics tools, from the pixel level up, for seldom does a packaged system do things I end up wanting to do, in the ways I want to do them. And consider this: there are more potential artworks than atoms in the known universe (a vast understatement); the "creation" of any one of them entails discarding all of the others. When, and how, should an unthinking, unfeeling mechanism be used to jettison those myriads of possibilities?

So my advice to everyone, myself included, is to use the machine for those parts of planning or execution if and where it helps; the important things are not the machines, but the artistic goals and/or what might be learned or demonstrated -- about images, or about human perception and experience.

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Rick Knowlton