Quantization of Humans

About the Math Art Museum

I call the body of media art works I create using mathematical formulas the “Math Art Museum.” The project was born to realize a society without boundaries between art and science, inspired by Galileo Galilei's words that “the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics.” Its goal is to express everything through mathematical formulas, and works are published on social media (TikTok, Instagram, Twitter).

Drawing Portraits with sin and cos

A project that draws human portraits using the waves of trigonometric functions.

Concept

This work is based on the hypothesis, drawn from quantum mechanics, that all human beings are waves with ambiguous boundaries. It attempts to resolve the divisions of humanity — by age, gender, disability, race, ethnicity, religion, and economic status — by converting humans into simple superpositions of sine and cosine waves, applying the quantum-mechanical principle that all matter has wave properties.

The “waves” of one hundred people were archived and drawn in ballpoint pen on paper with a pen plotter. Following the quantum-mechanical property that reality is fixed only through observation, an archived wave appears at random on the display only when a viewer observes the work.

Process

Photograph the subject and convert the image to monochrome
Analyze the image data and generate formulas (sampling so that darker areas produce denser waves and brighter areas sparser ones, then applying a discrete Fourier transform)
Plot the graph over the range 0–2π
Output on paper with a pen plotter (AxiDraw V3)
Display the archive of one hundred people at random, only when a camera detects a face

Custom software developed in Processing and openFrameworks is used, with webcam face detection implemented using the openCV library.