I had an idea to create a portrait of someone using the invention that they discovered. Alan Turing came to mind. Specifically his work on mathematically generating natural patterns. It’s pretty amazing reading about the life and work of Alan Turing. One thing that always fascinated me was his work into mathematical pattern generation which is now commonly called Reaction Diffusion or Turing patterns.

Wiki:The Turing pattern is a concept introduced by English mathematician Alan Turing in a 1952 paper titled “The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis”, which describes how patterns in nature, such as stripes and spots, can arise naturally and autonomously from a homogeneous, uniform state. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_pattern

So I set about taking the simple idea of using TouchDesigner to create a portrait of Alan Turing using his own Turing pattern generation systems. All of the animations you can see on my site page are created using TouchDesigner. Which you can see on my site: www.chriskeegan.co.uk/alan-turing-reaction-diffusion-portrait/

Below is a screenshot of the procedurally generated feedback loop node set up.

Due to not being able to find a large size portrait of Turing I first illustrated a realistic Black and White hi-res portrait of him using Photoshop. 

Then put the picture into TouchDesigner, where I created feedback reaction diffusion loops. Then I added my Photoshop portrait, played around with the noise and feedback settings to create all these different growing and bleeding out animations. It took quite some experimenting. At first try in Blender which I struggled to get working smoothly. Then a few weeks later I managed to get it working really well in TouchDesigner.

I was so happy with the results I decided to created a Three colour limited edition screen print including Two tones of Silver inked layers to create a poster in homage to him and his still unsung innervations in technology and mathematics.

Here it is in all its glory.

I wonder what he would make of Feedback loops in software like TouchDesigner let along all the stuff going on with Machine learning.

I hope you enjoy it and have a nice weekend.

More detailed and close up shots here: Shop