Manners of Unfolding: Explorations Following Laura Marks' Enfoldment and Infinity: An Islamic Genealogy of New Media Art

Manners of Unfolding, a web site by Finn Brunton
http://www.enfoldment.net

This graceful web site demonstrates some of the ways that the perceptible image unfolds from information, which in turn unfolds from the infinite–and folds back into it. We can call this enfolding-unfolding aesthetics. Nine original algorithmic artworks by artist-programmers, made in Processing, elegantly demonstrate aniconism, atomism, Baroque complexity, monadology, and other manners of unfolding found in both Islamic art and contemporary algorithmic media.
Artists:
kim asendorf
Alasdair Turner
Kyle McDonald
Martin Schneider
Jim Bumgardner
subpixel

Manners of Unfolding launches in conjunction with the publication of Enfoldment and Infinity: An Islamic Genealogy of New Media Art by Laura U. Marks. Enfoldment and Infinity establishes points of contact between classical Islamic art and contemporary computer-based art. Establishing and inventing Islamic “roots” for new media art, the book argues that specific moments of classical Islamic thought give us new and fruitful ways to think about contemporary art. The book also traces how Islamic aesthetics journeyed westward from medieval times on, drawing out powers of abstraction and embodiment, ultimately to inform modernism and contemporary new media art. It demonstrates meeting points between Islamic thought and the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, and it proposes an enfolding-unfolding aesthetics to explain how artworks (and other things) unfold from the universe through a filter of information. http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=12257