Tor de Vries

I started the Quantrian project to explore the experience of color through structure and form. Inspired by the artwork of modern art masters of geometry and color — Mark Rothko, Piet Mondrian, Ellsworth Kelly, and others — Quantrian uses the pure forms of square, circle, and line to experiment with hue and shade. As an ode to Vera Molnár’s “machine imaginaire,” I first imagined a world of abstract geometric paintings where randomness replaced whim and intuition, then I created it, designing and coding complex generative algorithms to explore this aesthetic. To make it as unpredictable as possible, Quantrian algorithms base their decisions of color, arrangement, angle, layering, blending modes, and more on the volatile, moment-by-moment measurements of quantum energy fluctuations in a laboratory vacuum chamber. No system could predict the readings, and therefore no system could reproduce the same process and results. By fusing the contextuality of color with the surprise of randomness and the impermanence of fleeting opportunity, each Quantrian painting is a unique fragment of our profound human experience.

As a visual designer, I am a unique fusion of artistic, marketing, business, and technology disciplines. I have decades of experience and awards in digital design and art direction; strategic branding, marketing and communications; fundraising and advocacy; computer programming; and more — for international nonprofits, academic institutions, startups, major corporations, and many other organizations. I have an MFA from Parsons School of Design (2005) and also teach undergraduate design. However, beyond the logos and websites and campaigns, my personal art in recent years has been explorations of color and code. For this I am not using modern AI systems that spit out fully formed images based on a few words, but personally writing thousands of lines of computer programming to develop work according to my own aesthetic.