2020
Gossamer
Andy Baker
No items found.
View this piece in VR

For years, Andy Baker has been fascinated with geometry and symmetry on one hand and creating digital images that have an organic or natural feel about them on the other. Having struggled with balancing both when using 3D software, Andy feels he finally cracked it with Gossamer. As a kid, Andy had a series of colouring books called “Altair Design Books” which used symmetry to create grids that could resemble Islamic tiling if you coloured them the right way. This, along with him spending a few months in Morocco in his 20s, notepad, pencil, protractor, and compass in-hand, inspired the tiling patterns and symmetry echoed in the piece. The maths behind the piece can partially be traced back to the work of mathematicians like John Conway and George Hart. He also credits Keijiro Takahashi’s faux-bokeh implementation in Unity, which is used in Gossamer. Andy hopes viewers will take a little time to watch how the piece changes, as he was careful to tune the process so that a wide variety of forms that can appear. He believes generation based on randomness can often feel a bit arbitrary and meaningless, so his approach is to balance the elements so there’s the illusion that something intentional is going on. "Watching car traffic from a distance can seem like random points of light but it’s actually lots of individual people making deliberate choices. This is kinda the complete opposite of that!", he says.

Tools used
Related ARTICLES
Featured in...
Spotlight
Spotlight: Andy Baker on Ascribing Personality to Randomness
Based in Brighton, UK, Andy Baker is an artist-developer who has “always been drawn towards more creative ends of tech, and probably the tech ends of the creative world”. For our November 2020 show called Body Clock we had the opportunity to work with Andy, specifically with the mathematical piece Gossamer. 
Related ARTICLES
Featured in...
News
MOR x Tribeca Immersive 2022
We're excited to host this year's Tribeca Immersive selections in the museum! Tribeca Immersive showcases cutting-edge virtual, augmented and mixed reality experiences by top artists pushing the boundaries of storytelling with technology through impactful and emotionally engaging stories.
News
Announcing The Canadian Collection
The Museum of Other Realities presents its first original collection of narrative experiences curated across the Canadian immersive ecosystem. The Canadian Collection, a project co-created with Kaleidoscope and produced in partnership with the National Film Board of Canada and Canada Media Fund will be held in the virtual gallery from December 17, 2021 to April 29, 2022.
Spotlight
Spotlight: Andy Baker on Ascribing Personality to Randomness
Based in Brighton, UK, Andy Baker is an artist-developer who has “always been drawn towards more creative ends of tech, and probably the tech ends of the creative world”. For our November 2020 show called Body Clock we had the opportunity to work with Andy, specifically with the mathematical piece Gossamer. 
News
The Museum of Other Realities is Now Free to Visit
We’re excited to announce that there’s no longer a paywall to get into the MOR!
Explore
More like this
Solve et Coagula
Cesar Ortega
 (
2018
)
Complex Chaos
Sean Tann
 (
2018
)
Stay up to date with new exhibits and events.
Thank you! You've been added to our mailing list
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.