Maeda's SIMPLICITY

Slowly Approaching Infinity

The missing link between time and space.

Perhaps the first thing I made of any consequence was this image hanging next to my computer at home. It was my first ambitious graphic in the PostScript (a language to drive high-resolution laserprinters) language. Desktop computers were not powerful enough to render my image, so I had it rendered on an imagesetter as used for pre-press tasks at the then ultra-high resolution of 1200 dpi. I recall dropping off the floppy disk in Harajuku at the output shop and waiting a day's time. The output was quite surprising. I had made something that I couldn't image on my own computer due to the incredible resolution of the imagesetting machine.

Nowadays rendering complex imagery is getting increasingly easier on desktop computers. Things that took days now only take seconds. To speak impractically for a moment, there's something lost with instant gratification. Slowness is not necessarily bad.

My black and white image was comprised of 10,000 loops of a Bezier curve. I realized that I could go for a million or even a zillion (is that a number?) turns of the digital pen. But at that point, the image produced wouldn't really look like anything impressive because it had gone past the point of looking like infinity.

Mathematicians say that when you start out at zero, and head towards positive infinity, you wrap around to negative infinity, and back to zero again. Maybe that's why I'd like to slow down when approaching infinity. It's important to enjoy the scenery while you can.

Posted by maeda at February 27, 2005 09:32 AM