Backtrack: Three

We can't avoid numbers, even if there is only one of us in a room. The Lottery, sports scores, paychecks, all contain numbers that are of importance to us, some more important than others. Numbers appear in religion, superstition, psychologist offices, and calendars. So for this prior exercise I chose to put up the concept of 'three' for the digestion of Artexercisers.

Three has some important connotations in religion, superstition, and even science. In religion, particularly Christianity, God comes in three parts, the father, son, and holy ghost. Superstitiously it is a commonly held belief that things always happen in groups of threes, whether for the good or the bad. In Science, there are three body forces and three body processes. The Atom in generally made of Neutrons, Protons and Electrons. And one of the strongest structures is a triangle.

Personally 3 was one of the first numbers that my father challenged me with to count as high as I could go. 3/3=1, 3-(3/3)=2, 3=3, 3+(3/3)=4, ... 3^3=27, ... etc. In research and literature papers I was always told to give three examples. And I have 3 arms...just kidding. Three is just one of those important numbers that keep popping up in one way or another.

For this past exercise however, I did two ideas. The first, not shown here, involves three masks floating in an ambivalent space with the number 3 placed over the obscured foremost mask. I was intimating the mystical religious relationship to the number three. I was saying that there are two faces that we think we clearly recognize despite the obvious obscurity of the foremost image people put forward of themselves. While I enjoyed my little attempt at putting for an example of the exercise I wanted something more significant.

I came up with this image while thing about three wheels turning one inside the other and how they might intersect at one point but otherwise appear as though they would collide with one another. The use of this idea can be seen in a more complex nature towards the ends of the movies Contact and 13 Ghosts. I wanted to convey with this piece the sense of seeing a world from a great distance and of seeing a tiny element of nature, akin to an atom, a small particle, or point of energy.

To create the image I've simply taken a torus and rotated it in the 3 different dimensions and applied a layer of slime and texture to those shapes. Inside the convolution I have placed the central object that represents the world and back lighted it to get the aura. The whole background is just a blown up textured plane that the shadows are cast on.

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