"Neighbours"

A series of highly visual designs by digital artist and programmer Robert Allison. "Neighbours: Two sets of similar colours, crossing with their neighbours, mix and reform as generations progress down. 10 results arranged side by side on each piece." In Robert's work individual colours are defined as 'genetic sequences', realised digitally as a string of 1s and 0s. Each is a kind of 'creature', encoded by a binary DNA, but then expressed as the usual RGB or HSV colour-map values. Because of this representation, colours can be mutated and crossed with each other within the computer to form new variations. Oversized pixels, rastered onto the image plane, are used to record these colours as they are created.

Visualising these operations shows how richness and complexity can emerge from simple processes iterated to a massive scale. The potential of the purely computational, the mechanistic, is explored as it approaches the boundary with the natural, the tactile, the 'real'.

Each series investigates a different combination of techniques, rendered for effect. The pieces are randomly seeded, and are a unique result from the process they express. They are titled by their 'Unix timestamp' - the exact time of creation recorded as the number of milliseconds since 00:00:00 UTC 1st January 1970.