ATOM is a way of thinking about digital images. The pixel is the atomic unit of every digital image — each pixel is three numbers that define the intensity of red, green, and blue light sources. Every digital image has two representations, a linear sequence of numbers and those numbers converted into a grid of lights that form an image. ATOM is the collision of the objective and subjective, it’s a space to explore.

An early version of ATOM, called ORA, was written in C++ in 2003. It was the first time I thought precisely about images as data and data as images. At that time, I was loading photographs into the system to “see” them in different ways, to look at their data through other representations. ATOM, created from scratch in 2023, is completely generative and synthesized. The static gooey color patterns are the core of ATOM. They are generated with code that combines sine waves. These patterns are the data sources that drive three other diagrammatic representations of each pattern image: color blocks, RGB signals, extruded terrain.

ATOM is my Rosetta Stone. It’s the foundation for ""An Empty Room,"" my work exhibited at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) in Spring 2023, and also ""923 Empty Rooms,"" a long-form generative art release with Bright Moments and Art Blocks in August 2023. This work all builds on my ""Still Life"" series, first exhibited at the bitforms gallery in New York in 2016 and concluding there with the final ""Still Life"" exhibition in November 2023.

Press “spacebar” to keep exploring the “space” of possibilities within the features of each mint. The ‘B’ key changes the background value.