Treeleaf Art Circle: Enso

[RichardH]

enso1.jpg


I thought it would be a good idea to restart the Art Circle with zero, and I have been trying to put together a fancy presentation on the Enso.
Then something interesting happened... there is a lot of material out there on the Enso, but for all that material.. there is very little said.

...beyond the same basic things.


enso 2.jpg


This quote sums up what can be found about the symbolism...

It can symbolize emptiness or fullness, presence or absence. All things might be contained within, or, conversely, excluded by its boundaries. It can symbolize enlightenment, or it can symbolize the moon, which is itself a symbol of enlightenment—as in the Zen saying, "Do not mistake the finger pointing at the moon for the moon itself." Julia Hardy

enso 3.jpg


......and the act of painting the Enso can be summed up nicely by this entry from Wikipedia....

In Zen Buddhism, an ensō (円相 , "circle" ?) is a circle that is hand-drawn in one or two uninhibited brushstrokes to express a moment when the mind is free to let the body create. The ensō symbolizes absolute enlightenment, strength, elegance, the universe, and mu (the void).

enso 4.jpg


It says a lot that Wikipedia has a pretty good entry on this. The Enso is not esoteric. It has depth, but it is a depth we can all relate to......



enso 5.jpg


The Enso is a symbol that has thoroughly entered western culture. It pervades the marketplace and is completely taken up by pop culture. A trip to the local "natural" grocers yesterday turned up the Enso on labels for a variety of products, none of Asian origin.

....and yet I do not think this pop culture and commercial appropriation has degraded the Enso in any way. It remains a simple circle made with a free and beautiful gesture, and it just glides through, always somehow pure.




So... Please make an Enso! Make it from any material you like on any scale you like... but please do it in PLAY.



When you have made an Enso please share on this thread. There is no judgement, no competition, there is just your Treeleaf community. If you would like to write anything about the Enso, please do. Poetry, photos of accidental Ensos of all kinds, it is all good.



Thank you and Gassho

Daizan

sat today

[Sekishi]

Daizan and I were talking music making tonight, so I thought I'd play with the idea of the Enso in music composition and performance.

At an obvious surface level, the Enso is a loop, and music is replete with loops - repeating phrases and rhythms, samples, tape loops, etc. It also represents motion / action and creation "at once" - without inhibitions or overthinking.

So here was my concept: Record or sequence a series of musical phrases of differing lengths (3bars+14beats, 6bars+4beats, etc.) using instruments Daizan and I were discussing earlier tonight.

- Kawai K5000S - a very cool digital additive synth
- Moog Mother32 - a very warm analog subtractive synth
- A piano - like the truly analog kind
- A synthesized / sampled electric piano (Rhodes)

Since the loops are not the same length, they will not repeat with the same period, the melodies and themes and rhythms will get out of phase with each other (some of you may recognize this technique from Steve Reich's "Piano Phase" and others).

Anyhow, so I set up all these loops to run on their own, while I could move between them tweaking the synth patches, adding effects (filter, tape delay, reverb, etc.).

As a first time out of the gate for this sort of live loop based performance, I kept things fairly slow moving and ambient (so I could tweak and play without too much pressure). It was fun even if it ain't great art. ^_^

https://soundcloud.com/circumjacence/0301a?in=circumjacence/sets/circumjacence-127-minutes

Gassho,
Sekishi #sat #looped

[Sekishi]

BTW: This video sort of shows how two different length loops creates an interesting evolving structure of phrases (using Steve Reich's "Piano Phases"):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57TuvksMR70

Gassho,
Sekishi #sat

[Kyonin]

Enso. Never totally open, never totally closed. Nothingness surrounded with stuff, surrounded with nothingness.

Thank you, Daizan.

I drew this inspired by your words.

CsfvJoiUsAAJBCs.jpg


Gassho,

Kyonin

[RichardH]

Thank you Kyonin and Sekishi .

Gassho
Daizan

Sat today

[Jakuden]

Daizan and I were talking music making tonight, so I thought I'd play with the idea of the Enso in music composition and performance.

At an obvious surface level, the Enso is a loop, and music is replete with loops - repeating phrases and rhythms, samples, tape loops, etc. It also represents motion / action and creation "at once" - without inhibitions or overthinking.

So here was my concept: Record or sequence a series of musical phrases of differing lengths (3bars+14beats, 6bars+4beats, etc.) using instruments Daizan and I were discussing earlier tonight.

- Kawai K5000S - a very cool digital additive synth
- Moog Mother32 - a very warm analog subtractive synth
- A piano - like the truly analog kind
- A synthesized / sampled electric piano (Rhodes)

Since the loops are not the same length, they will not repeat with the same period, the melodies and themes and rhythms will get out of phase with each other (some of you may recognize this technique from Steve Reich's "Piano Phase" and others).

Anyhow, so I set up all these loops to run on their own, while I could move between them tweaking the synth patches, adding effects (filter, tape delay, reverb, etc.).

As a first time out of the gate for this sort of live loop based performance, I kept things fairly slow moving and ambient (so I could tweak and play without too much pressure). It was fun even if it ain't great art. ^_^

https://soundcloud.com/circumjacence/0301a?in=circumjacence/sets/circumjacence-127-minutes

Gassho,
Sekishi #sat #looped

Whoa. Such beautiful sound! You should submit that to the Hayden Planetarium to use as a soundtrack to the stars!

Gassho
Jakuden
SatToday


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[Tairin]

Very nice Sekishi. Not related to Enso but I've experimented with stacking loops of different lengths a bit as well. I like the accidental contrasts that are created as various loops phrases line up. A lot of interesting music can come out of doing this.

Gassho
Warren
Sat today

[Kokuu]

Thank you for the exposition, Daizan. I think that the beauty of enso lie in their simplicity.

Love both the contributions of Sekishi and Kyonin. I would never have thought of sonic enso.

Here is one I made earlier: http://s475.photobucket.com/user/win...0de06.jpg.html

And a haiku (I know, surprise!):

empty sky
a bird traces the outline
of the letter O


Gassho
Kokuu
#sattoday

[RichardH]

Thank you Kokuu, that is a beautiful enso. The name Winterfool is also beautiful.

Gassho
Daizan

Sat today

[Kyousui]

I don't consider my self artistic but the article prompted me to find an enso around me and this is what I found.
Ensos hanging around and sitting .jpg

[Sekishi]

As I've written about before in the art circle, I sometimes play around with custom software to apply cellular automata rulesets on the pixels in images. In particular I am very interested in "non-destructuve" and simple rules that adhere to the following three commandments:

1. The rules must be "non-destructive". No pixel is ever overwritten, only swapped with a neighbor. This means that no "information" in the image is ever created or destroyed, only re-arranged.

2. The rules must be "local" - for each pixel in the image, the rules can ONLY examine the 8 pixels immediately surrounding it (e.g. to the N, NE, E, SE, S, SW, W, and NW). This means that any interesting higher-order patterns that emerge come from rules that only operate at a local level.

3. Images are treated as "spherical" and "continuous" (e.g. when looking at neighboring pixels at the edge of the image, we wrap-around to the other side of the image).

Further reading on the general topics:
- http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Turmite.html
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_Game_of_Life


Anyhow, this afternoon I fed Kokuu's Enso and Dogen quote into my pixelsorting "turmites", and recorded the result as a stop-motion animation (apologies, it was recorded by a smartphone on a trippod, so the results are pretty low-fidelity but probably still best viewed at at least 720p):

Gassho,
Sekishi #sat #sortedpixels

[Sekishi]

1. The rules must be "non-destructive". No pixel is ever overwritten, only swapped with a neighbor. This means that no "information" in the image is ever created or destroyed, only re-arranged.

Just to drive this point, home -- all operations in the sort are reversible. No information is lost during the sort - the original image is still there, just manifested in a different form.

Gassho,
Sekishi #sat #belabouredtheobvious

[Kokuu]

That is really interesting! Thanks, Sekishi! It looks like sand .

My PhD research brushed up against artificial life and Conway's Game of Life as I used cellular automata models to simulate the interactions between plants in a grassland ecosystem.

Gassho
Kokuu

[Sekishi]

My PhD research brushed up against artificial life and Conway's Game of Life as I used cellular automata models to simulate the interactions between plants in a grassland ecosystem.

That is awesome!

In college I worked with the Physics department to use cellular automata modules to simulate a number of scenarios (such as fluid dynamics). Nowadays I just play with them because they are beautiful.

I also thought it might be timely as there was a discussion of Conway's Game of Life at the Treeleaf Coffeehouse last week.

Gassho,
Sekishi #sat

P.S. I hope you don't mind me destroying your beautiful image Kokuu. Gassho.

[RichardH]

I don't consider my self artistic but the article prompted me to find an enso around me and this is what I found.
[ATTACH=CONFIG]4045[/ATTACH]

Hi Tom . Thankyou!

Gassho
Daizan
Sat today