Approximation Theory (nine print version)

This work was prepared for the Virtualities and Realities Exhibition, which is part of the RIXC Art and Science Festival, held in Riga, Latvia, in October 2017, as part of the Open Fields Conference on Artistic Research. The Festival is organized by RIXC / Riga in collaboration with the Renewable Futures Headquarters / Oslo, and Art-A-Hack / New York, and Hybrid Lab Nordplus project academic partners: Liepaja University, Aalto University and HiOA, Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Sciences. It is supported by the EU Programme “Creative Europe”, Risk Change project, Nordplus Hybrid Lab project, the State Culture Capital Foundation of Latvia, Riga City Council, the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Latvia.

The work presented was part of Approximation Theory, an art-research project in visual mathematics and data aesthetics. It consists of a series of prints that visualize the mathematical idea of approximation. The methodology used in the work involves the choice of a set of fixed dictionaries or databases of images. Each dictionary has its own distinctive quality. Any other image can then be reconstructed as a weighted superposition of all or some of the images in the dictionary. The character of the approximation depends on two kinds of factors: qualitative and quantitative. The qualitative aspect has to do with the character of images in the dictionary, for instance whether they are linear or curved. The quantitative aspect has to do with the number of images from the dictionary that are used in the reconstruction: the larger this number, the more faithful the reconstruction.