Biography

Who is Mandy Brigwell?

I'm a mathematician and a computer programmer, or at least those were the areas I studied at university and, obviously, areas of personal interest for me. I grew up at a time where computers were just becoming affordable and thus mainstream: my education initially featured a single computer in a school, a hallowed and precious device that was barely used and a mystery to the majority of my teachers, right through to the glory days of the computer lab: row upon row of 286-based machines, and a server with a mere fraction of the power of the iPhone on my desk. Times have changed, but the underlying fascination of computer programming, the rendering of mathematics into beautiful graphical forms, and the endless fascinatination of the screen have remained.

I was always drawn to geometry, and articles concerning trigonometry or dimensions beyond three were always alluring. ‘Mathematicians Delight’ by W.W. Sawyer inspired some excellent diversions, and Martin Gardner could always be relied on to offer keen intellectual challenge for those able to lay their hands on copies of Scientific American: no easy task in days before widespread internet access. Benoit Mandelbrot really set something in motion with fractal geometry, and I was drawn into strange attractors, chaos theory and the wonderful complex plane, even if imaginary numbers remained something of a mystery for far too long.

A handwritten book, charmingly naïve perhaps, of algorithms from 1992 reveal my fascination with such things. Designed for the Casio FX700GA graphics calculator, I'd set a program running to render the Mandelbrot set and watch over the space of an hour as a blocky, 1-bit version formed before me. I should have been studying, of course, but maybe the time wasn't entirely wasted.

There's no big secret to being Mandy Brigwell. I'll happily mention to anyone who listens my admiration for Greg Egan, a programmer and author who's managed, for many years now, to keep his likeness and social details a complete secret from any search engine you might try. His work, whether it's text or graphics-based, stands on its own, and if Mr. Egan makes use of social media he does it on his own terms and his doting fans remain at a distance. I am Mandy Brigwell, and although I may have let a few details leak, my aim is much the same. It's not about being unappreciative of fans; I'm happy to interact on social media, but the Mandy who produces art, music, poetry and prose is separate to the Mandy that cleans the house, worries about the cat, shops for food, and makes up excuses to avoid family gatherings.

Primarily, the creation of art is for my own entertainment, perhaps even for my own education. I like to find beauty in mathematics, though it's not hard to do, and I like to learn new things. There is art to be found in the intersection of such aims, and if it pleases others as well as myself, then so much the better.

Much of my art is abstract, though of late I've been branching out into a thematically shared universe, producing pieces that maintain an abstract quality but also represent real-life scenes. Only the other day I realised that a piece of fiction I wrote some time around the turn of the millennium fits into the overarching mythos of The Last Days of Fire and Steel. It's interesting to realise that this concept has been present in my head, in some form or another, for twenty years or so.

Sometimes a mathematical article sets me off; sometimes the view from a window. Once, the universe presented me with the sun inching above the horizon as a light mist clung to the fields, rays of marmalade light gilding the underside of the early-morning clouds, and my first thought was 'How could I make this in p5js?' — I'm not sure whether that's terrible or not!

Beside an ungrateful lack of appreciation for natural wonders, I may start out with a question of some kind, a 'what if'. Often it turns out these thoughts are terribly unoriginal - the last one, it transpired, was simply a well-known chaos game - but occasionally they lead somewhere interesting.

Sometimes the piece goes somewhere, often it simply meanders off. Occasionally, I'll lose the piece along the way; a change to the code somewhere veers off track and I'll wish I could find my way back to what came before. Copies, backups and versioning helps, though there are times when I find it's simply best to abandon things in favour of something new. I keep the old versions around, but to be quite honest it's a little like that room full of Ripleys in Alien Resurrection, and it can be similarly unnerving to revisit.

Beyond the immediate world of generative art, I'm fond of Bridget Riley, M.C. Escher, Salvador Dalí, Giacomo Balla, H.R. Giger, and Zdzisław Beksiński. Of those, it would seem Escher and Riley best stand as influences of my work, while Giger and Beksiński simply reflect what I find aesthetically interesting. Then again, The Last Days of Fire and Steel has a strong link to Giger's Cataract, so maybe in time the surrealist artworks will begin to show more influence in my pieces.

In March, 2021, Gorilla Sun - @gorillasu - posted an article titled “Getting started with Tezos and minting on hicetnunc.xyz”. I remember reading it, and the concept seemed rather alien to me; I genuinely found it hard to comprehend the basic ideas of this new and mysterious landscape. Scams, blockchains, anonymity and crypto… it was all too much, and I was way out of my depth. Though perhaps over-timid, certainly over-cautious, I was intrigued, bookmarked it, and moved on.

As these things do, the idea lodged in my mind. In the news, on blogs, on Twitter especially, I kept reading about NFTs. I’d had thoughts of a new career in web design, and was ploughing through FreeCodeCamp’s JavaScript and responsive web design modules. I came back to Processing and finally began to make serious forays into looped gifs, propelled by the inspiring works of Bees and Bombs. My early efforts are not hard to find on Open Processing, though they’re hardly worth the trouble. Improvement was rapid, and eventually I felt I had a piece that could serve as a toe in the water. The rest is, I guess, a matter of blockchain record.

I have so many projects at the moment, and few of them seem to be reaching a satisfactory conclusion. I set out the other day to produce something simple, feeling the need for clean lines and a bold, pure aesthetic. It soon turned into fuzzy dots and gradients… it seems to be a phase I'm in. If there's one thing I've learned over the past year, though, it's to take my time; no-one's so desperate for the next Mandy Brigwell that they wouldn't happily wait until it's properly finished. The 'momentum' I thought I was chasing towards the latter end of last year was imaginary; a slow, steady building of reputation is worth the time and effort. Or so I tell myself…

I'm heavily invested in the tezos blockchain, and so far I've steered mostly clear of other blockchains. I know changes are afoot with Ethereum, but even if it's considered a clean blockchain now, I'm not sure I'm at ease with the transaction fees and so on. Perhaps I should give it a chance, I don't know…