George Legrady
Hungary, 1950
George Legrady is an artist and researcher who has worked with digital media since the early 1980s, exploring how data, algorithms and archives shape the images we see.
Artwork in the Encyclopedia of New Media Art archive
IsingVariations
About the artwork
IsingVariations depicts a grid of cells whose behaviour constantly shifts according to the states of their neighbours. Its title refers to the Ising model, a classic model in physics that describes how the magnetic states of particles align with those around them. In Legrady’s animation, the grid moves between ‘periods of relative stability,’ when each cell tends to mimic its surroundings, and ‘moments of indecision,’ when cells register their neighbours’ states but hesitate to align with them. A programmed degree of deviance ensures that certain cells resist conformity altogether. Their small acts of resistance create local disruptions that ripple across the whole composition, so that the image keeps oscillating between order and disruption.
Artistic career: George Legrady
Artistic practice and research
George Legrady (Hungary, 1950) is an artist and researcher who has worked with digital media since the early 1980s, exploring how data, algorithms and archives shape the images we see. His works include Pockets Full of Memories, first shown at the Centre Pompidou, and Making Visible the Invisible, a long-running data visualization at the Seattle Public Library. He is a professor of Media Arts and Technology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he directs the Experimental Visualization Lab.