Making Waves at UC Santa Barbara
Media Arts and Technology Professor George Legrady Exhibits New Algorithmic Art
This story was originally published in UCSB’s The Current.
It was an earworm that lasted four dozen years, but it wasn’t a jingle, it was an algorithm. An equation George Legrady came across in 1986 in Scientific American has captured his imagination again and again ever since. In 2021, he returned to it once more to create “Phantom Waves,” a series of images exploring the intersection of digital photography and math, now on view in the California Nanosystems Institute on the second floor of Elings Hall at UC Santa Barbara.
“Every once in a while, I come back to this, how to use math equations to create aesthetically interesting results,” said Legrady, distinguished professor of media art and technology. “The minute you digitize a photograph, it’s really not a photograph anymore; it’s just a string of numbers. The other thing about digitality is you can move data from one domain to another. You can turn data into a sound or an image because it’s just numbers.”
