Craig-S-Kaplan

Craig S. Kaplan is a Professor in the School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo. He's interested in a broad range of interdisciplinary topics, with a particular focus on interactions between mathematics and art. He uses mathematical ideas to create tools and algorithms that generate ornamental patterns, or that empower artists and designers. His work frequently incorporates knowledge from computer graphics, classical and computational geometry, human-computer interaction, graph theory, symmetry and tiling theory, and perceptual psychology.

A creative and rapid collection of sketches that Kaplan has done was made through some sabbatical Genuary exercises. Genuary is an annual "Generative January" challenge where a generative artist makes daily artworks responding to a prompt. Each daily sketch through this challenge is an attempt to reach artistic expression from generative code. Here you can see "ASCII" and "Particles, lots of them" prompts from the artists's Genuary 2024 collection, using P5.js with their source code visible on the same platform.

Speaking of assembled artworks, Kaplan also curated a collaborative collage of generative animations through the Swirled Series in 2020. Starting from a public reachout for gathering short animation submissions following certain characteristics like fixed start and end frames and duration, and after 81 contributors and 115 loops, the randomly ordered playback of these artworks highlights how such works can be expanded and further generated—besides the satisfying feeling of keeping looping through the clips.

Kaplan has demonstrated the result of his observations on tilings and geometric transformation in variable ways, ranging from scientific research such as looking for an aperiodic monotile or "Einstein Tile" to developing illustrations of simplistic tilings turned digital. The "Animated Map Colourings of Hinged Squares" on the right is such an example.

Kaplan has dedicated work on developing software for generating algorithmic geometric art, which is often inspired by traditional sources. The Spin Draw app originated from a mechanical drawing toy from the 1930s called a HOOT-NANNY which drew curves called spiraloids. The Concentric tool is also an attempt to algorithmize the construction of Islamic geometric patterns with different types like Moroccan zellij style, which is a pattern involving stars with as many as 96 points in real-life models of architecture and challenging to algorithmize. The interactive tool lets the user grow a "core sample" or a radial slice of polygons with repetitions layer by layer, making an Islamic pattern. He also worked on similar generative tools for procedural generative zellij patterns and simple Persian rug patterns.

https://isohedral.ca
https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/~csk
https://isohedral.ca/blog
https://isohedral.ca/software
https://mathstodon.xyz/@csk
https://editor.p5js.org/isohedral/sketches
https://isohedral.ca/generative-zellij
https://isohedral.ca/aperiodic-monotiles