Mirror Cube #1: Celestial Mirror

MIRROR CUBES by William Latham is a series of 16 images created with the MUTATOR AI system, which the artist developed with programmer Stephen Todd. It is a blast of color and floral exuberance, influenced by Impressionist landscape painting and artists such as Gustav Klimt. 

The idea behind MIRROR CUBES is to take a mutation variant from MUTATOR and FormGrow and place it in a closed mirrored space, creating infinite refractions. This results in a kaleidoscope effect where viewers find it challenging to distinguish between the form and the reflections, offering them a visual feast of colors.

MUTATOR is the software that William Latham used to generate artistic variants from a starting 3D organic form. The initial form is defined by a grammar called FormGrow, which consists of a long series of numbers. These numbers determine various characteristics of the 3D form, such as the amount of twist, bend, branches, horns, and so on. MUTATOR functions like an 'evolutionary fruit machine,' randomly altering these numbers with each spin to create a new variant.

Furthermore, Latham can crossbreed two or more variants, combining characteristics from one or more parents to produce multiple offspring. The technology William Latham and Stephen Todd have developed operates within the realm of Genetic Algorithms (GA). Together with the additional technology developed by Stephen Todd for structure mutation and navigating multi-dimensional parameter space, it represents a form of Artificial Intelligence (AI), often referred to as Artificial Life.

Historically, MUTATOR was originally developed by Stephen Todd and William Latham in the late 1980s at IBM, coinciding with Genetic Algorithm techniques pioneered by Richard Dawkins and Karl Sims during that period.

The MIRROR CUBES are an evolution from Latham’s LISTENING ROOM series (inspired by Magritte) from the 1990s in which individual mutations are rendered inside an enclosed cube space.

"The MIRROR CUBES series represents a departure from the mood of my earlier work in the late 1980s and 90s, as well as my recent FANTASY VIRUS series. In the FANTASY VIRUS series, the mutated 3D forms are displayed in a vast void, a bleak infinite empty space, resembling biological specimens with little or only dark coloring.

In contrast, the MIRROR CUBES series features forms enclosed in a highly reflective and warmly colored space, presenting a more playful approach influenced by my time in rave music. While I personally appreciate decoration, I consider it somewhat of an artistic indulgence. This perspective is why I describe these images as shamelessly decorative."

– William Latham