Mollick's  Filmed  Greeting

Bio

Michael Mollick was born a synesthete...

 

Synesthesia is a rare genetic condition found only in 5% of the world’s population. It’s when two different senses somehow become intertwined, evoking entirely separate and unrelated senses. Sound can evoke colors much like smells often evoke specific memories or feelings for most everyone. By the age of nine, his synesthesia had eventually reversed as the complex real world gradually intruded upon the fantastical youthful images he remembers; Colors and complex patterns dancing in his childish visual fields attuned to specific music, especially classical, as he was an early piano prodigy. He came to believe that those early screwed-up sensual connections in his brain were strong enough to dictate the direction of his life and work. First, Michael became a real world painter of extraordinary realism in his 20s, migrating to full CG and digital content by the age of 32, (less smelly, he explains), but he's never considered himself to be a true artist because he always secretly knew that his only real genius was pattern recognition, perhaps somehow enhanced by his early experiences as a synesthete.

 

"Patterns are everywhere, in art, music, history, science, literature, computers, and within human behavior. Unquestionably, when one sees them as clearly and naturally as I always have, one begins to rely on the inevitable cheats of such a gift, like a seemingly mystifying diversity of natural talents and proclivities; like the ability to obtain a solid education without benefit of study or hard work, or the ability to perfectly mimic human behaviors designed to adapt to and/or manipulate others - no cheat for which I can ever truly take pride, and quite honestly never did until the advent of my digital creative career."

 

"The early 1990s of Windows NT 4.0, 14.4K baud dial-up internet connections consisting mainly of Compuserve and America On-Line because most internet site’s welcome pages took an hour to load. In one of those earliest of communities, I happened across a heated technical discussion on the relative merits and purity of mathematics in one piece of “Fractal Art” versus another."

 

Fractal Art was the first big trend of Internet art to sweep the electronic world.  Michael followed the rabbit and there found, for the first time in his adult life, the perfect representations of his early musical visions.

 

"I’m not saying I understood anything about the complex Calculus math, no chance of that even now as I continue to create unique program-guided formula’s which duplicate the colors and patterns of my childhood."

 

Sweeping alien micro vistas of beautiful, complexly detailed, yet scalable geometries as devisively infinite between the whole numbers -1 and one, (The Mandelbrot Set,) as the macro universe seemingly is itself. (Perhaps currently best known as the Einstein-Hawking Set).

 

"I was instantly transformed into the glorious and embarrassingly lucrative pastime of pure philosophy. Settle down girls, marriage applications were not then available due to inherent restrictions of poverty, a wife and five kids."

 

But as always for Michael, here too were the glaring patterns of Fibinocci and transcendental numbers, God’s random signature across everything organic or crystalline in the known universe.

 

"The instant I recognized the fractal patterns of my childhood memories, I learned how the complexities resembled chaos and the elegant, more-often inelegant organics of all life-itself. But beware of that thread, lest you run the risk of embracing pure philosophy like I did, woohoo!...

 

So here then was Michael's first set of photographic and mixed-media images in-which he attempted to define and blend the unseen fractal world, which is increasingly being discovered within the mechanics of everything in the known universe. Michael believes Fractals may be the very basis of our human sense of esthetics; patterns suggested in the kinetic artistic rhythms of beauty, art, music, and dance; where the confluence of tasteful nudity can both hide and shine within the organics of the mystical GOLDEN RATIO or even within the imagined colorings of a synesthete’s musical vision.

 

"Wait for it, you’ll see it…"

 

                                                                                     ~ Michael Mollick