ancient Magic Square

Now that I know how to do it I wanted to throw in one of my own ancient pieces: over 20 years old(!) but still nice. Produced at now defunct West Coast University in LA with Jim Blinn's Blobby Molecule software originally developed at JPL, computed on a Digital Equipment VAX11/750 (or so?), displayed on an AED framebuffer with 10 bit color resolution, i.e 1024 colors. That was a lot of colors for me to juggle after having previously worked with game machines that could only handle 2 and 4 bit, i.e 4 or 16 colors.


Vedic Square, by Frank Dietrich 1983

Color and size of the blobs was determined by the 9x9 numbers located in a very distinguished Magic Square, the Vedic Square which was used in Indian numerology for various spiritual and mathematic purposes. At the time I was fascinated by the particular visual harmonies these squares produced on the basis of their numeric relationships. If I find more of them in hidden boxes I'll publish them here. One I still see in front of my eyes became the building block for an animation called Magic Carpet Ride produced on Tom DeFanti's ZGrass machine.