Piter Pasma’s “Balls to the Walls” is an example of the artist’s unique ability to create worlds with advanced techniques. Using swirls to create illusory color, Pasma combines simple primitive forms to suggest a deeper story. The subject of these artworks are seemingly plucked from a story by H.P. Lovecraft, representing unknowable alien circumstances, existing despite the threat of all-consuming darkness. The combination of small multiples into a larger body echo the theme of the exhibition: building something from the influence of many parts.

Pasma has great technical influence on his contemporaries, providing many generative artists with pseudorandom number generators and elegantly written functions. His experience in the European demoscene of the late 1990s continues to drive his pursuit of technical excellence, manipulating each pixel with complex mathematical equations in as few characters of code as possible. With this mastery, Pasma is able to create photorealistic renderings, yet in this artwork he eschews that realism for a distorted sense of alien mystery.

The camera work behind the 1997 science fiction horror movie Cube served as inspiration for Pasma’s research in generating random 3-dimensional (3D) signed distance field (SDF) environments. The set for the film consists of only one and a half rooms, yet the story takes place across a large maze with many distinct rooms. The film crew used camera angles and lighting tricks to leverage limited space to give the illusion of many unique spaces. The artist imagines a single corner in an infinite room, with an inverse cubic corner protruding from it, as the base 3D scene for every composition in the artwork, producing variations through camera angles and color.