Digital Esoterism

This page relates to a form of "Esoterism" practiced through digital tools in the digital age, i first joked about this concept in response to a question in a video of one of my procedural graphics intro.

Goal of this page is to showcase / explain artistic explorations or quick doodles that don't fit in my other activities. They are created using digital methods such as code or FOSS compositing tools such as GIMP, i tend to prefer tiny code and tools operations (symmetry transformations etc.) that require little effort to reproduce as code.

Inspiration came from things i engage with, music, books, games and so on... no inherent meaning behind these works (also count for all my works, by the way !), some may still carry very loose symbolic associations (e.g. the snail etc.) with a blend of personal history, most of this can be seen as a form of symbolic play.

Some of my IFS fractals or intros may also fall into this category.

The Orz Snail

This started with tiny algorithms to turn very simple typography to cursive writings, also have a version with a HAKMEM 149 version of epicycle, i replaced the "O" by a HAKMEM 149 spiral, it looked like a snail by accident and this was quite cool... the underline was added as a decoration, a small rotation was then applied to enforce an idea of movement, a snail "passing by".

The low effort addition of an inverted pentagram which was produced with yet another tiny algorithm, this is again loosely related to the concept of "passing by" (and slowing down; turning back) and as a way to fill the empty space produced by the rotation.

The Orz Snail as an Owl

Transformation of the snail by duplicating the original bitmap and applying a reflection which looks like a stylized face or an Owl.

The Orz composition

Fun compo made around snails (with trail adjustments), the Decagram that looks like a chaos star was made by duplicating the pentagram and applying a reflection with XOR blending (also called "difference"), the background is a recycled IFS fractal (too bare to release as is), the image is reflected in the lower part as some sort of water surface by applying a light perspective transformation with the combination of a "shift" and "slur" filter. (GIMP)

The water surface trick is a favorite of mine, it is cheap and still produce nice results, the "shift" operation is just some rows of pixels that is shifted by random amount and the "slur" operation randomly slide pixels downward, this was used in the past to add water surface to some of my IFS images, see also this. (simple distort also works)

Pentagram was removed from the reflection, probably some leftover.

Background IFS fractal in full form with the central figure shadow / hole looking like a Frog / Octopus or Phage :

The Orz "flag"

Spiral come from a procedural graphics intro.

HAKMEM 149 triskel

Simple triskel with the HAKMEM 149 algorithm, the spiral is duplicated three times with an offset, shading based on iterations. Inspiration came from the use of the Triskel on a Brigitte Fontaine Genre Humain album. (1995)

HAKMEM 149 compo

Combination of multiple tiny algorithms to form a composition, tentacles are produced by a variant of the HAKMEM 149 algorithm (which started with the triskel experiment), tentacles are duplicated with symmetry, the background is gibberish and is produced by a 6-bit tiny binary font algorithm, the tombstone is actually "Orz" as gray coded binary font, this method was also used in Agrippa Vanities as a Dotsies signature. It loosely relate to combination and balance in the Anthropocene.

Originally animated with random rotation of the pentagram, giggling tentacles and gibberish produced in real-time.

Sator square

Word square (Sator square) with extruded 3x3 font letters, a bit rubbish as is so made an animated variant with HAKMEM 149 background sparks / noise and flattened chroma letters in one of my jam video.

SQRT + HAKMEM 149 mandala

"Mandala" started from a glitchy SQRT circle (see below) carved out with a HAKMEM 149 based fractal, edge detection was then applied with some low effort symbols added.

Pentagram + fire compo

Polar fire effect with two imbricated pentagram with a circle border looking like chains (varying size circles), inspiration mainly came from metal music.