I call the graphic you see on the left the Base Mandala because I designed it as a base for further explorations into the nature of beauty and generative art. You can see the generation of this image in the two images following.

The Base Mandala was generated from a digital representation of a conversation between OnBeing host, Krista Tippet and John O'Donohue called a spectrogram. A spectrogram shows the content of audio as a graph of pitches and intensities through time. A computer is able to read this image and play back its content.

Since this conversation spoke to nearly every issue I found important at the time, with a remarkable sensitivity and confident unsurity I still appreciate, I figured it would be a fitting base to work with.

Since I was also exploring my relation to the landscape of Iowa through the milkweed plant, and was deeply interested in the strangeness of the five-part symmetry present in its remarkable flowers, I designed the base with strong qualities of five-part symmetry by taking the spectrogram field and superimposing itself with a series of 72 degree rotations.

Taking this base, which is inherently beautiful thanks to its embedded geometry, I could then confidently explore universal qualities of generative beauty.

More on the project can be found here.