Energy, Flow, & Mystery
My imaging philosophy is very simple. I strive to record the subtle, interconnected web of energy that makes up what we call the world. For me, beauty, which permeates everything around us, appears in its most sublime state when form, color, pattern and texture are all in harmony.
In the same way as all “objects” in this world are fundamentally impermanent, and essentially arbitrary, partitions of an otherwise continuous, unfragmented whole, photography is (again, for me) an almost mystical process whereby the “veils of fragmentation” are momentarily lifted and the underlying essence of the universe is revealed. To “see” the whole, one must first learn see “parts” as real illusions.
Photographs are nothing other than abstract brushstrokes applied to nature. If one applies these brushsrokes intuitively, so that they capture a part of nature’s deep rhythms, they permit our minds to glimpse, however briefly, the even deeper truth that lies forever hidden beyond our physical senses.
The better an image is at weaving together, in holographic fashion, the seemingly disparate “things” that make up the world, and thereby at creating a unified, emergent whole that transcends any single element of which it is composed, the happier I am as a photographer. The ultimate photographic expression, of course, would be to capture everything in nothing, but the resulting image might appear to some as too uninteresting to display.
www.ilachinski.com
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Since receiving his doctorate in theoretical physics from the State University at Stony Brook, NY in 1988 (for which he explored the consequences of dynamically coupling cellular automata to their underlying lattice, among other complexity-related topics), Dr. Ilachinski has been a research analyst and project director at the Center for Naval Analyses ( CNA ) in Alexandria, VA. There, he has focused mostly on mathematical and computer simulation studies. His projects have ranged from applying simulated annealing to surface surveillance problems, to radar modeling, to applying neural nets to electronic intelligence management and ambiguity resolution problems.
Dr. Ilachinski was CNA's field representative to the Tactical Electronic Warfare Wing at Whidbey Island, Washington, where he provided technical support for the Navy's EA-6B electronic jammer aircraft. He has observed and reconstructed Navy exercises and has co-authored the Electronic Warfare volume of CNA's Operation Desert Storm reconstruction report.
Recently, in studies sponsored by the US Marine Corps and the Office of Naval Research , Dr. Ilachinski has been exploring the applicability of complex adaptive systems theory and nonlinear dynamics to the understanding of land warfare. As part of that research he is currently developing a sophisticated PC-based, multiagent-based "artificial-life" modeling toolkit (called EINSTein ) to help explore self-organized emergent behavior in combat. He has lectured extensively during the past five years to widely diverse civilian (including a very receptive audience at the Smithsonian ) and military audiences about how complexity might fundamentally alter the way in which we understand warfare.
Most recently, Dr. Ilachinski appeared in the February 2006 issue of B&W magazine in a Spotlight on pages 98-101. Find more information on B&W magazine at http://www.bandwmag.com.
Dr. Ilachinski has written two graduate-level mathematical physics texts: (1) Cellular Automata: A Discrete Universe , and (2) Artificial War: Multiagent-Based Simulation of Combat . Both are published by World Scientific .
When not making his bad eyes even worse by sitting in front of a computer and playing with his artificial life forms, Andy is almost always enjoying his family and prowling around the neighborhood with his Nikon Coolpix 950 , Olympus E10 , Canon D60 & 1D Mark II and assortment of batteries, tripods, lenses, filters and compact flash cards. Though Andy never foresaw the day his beloved film-based Canon A2E would spend more time in the camera bag than out, the appearance of the remarkably capable D60 and 1D Mark II digital cameras has rendered all such musings moot once and for all!
For further information and to see more of Ilachinski 's work, go to, www.ilachinski.com
