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yes. we know that if one has to explain WHY SOMETHING IS ART then this is a no-no thing. We love no-no things.

A lot of fine art is connected to the perception of images. E.g. when a painting is perceived, it's stroke, colours, content etc. are read in by the brain and processed. The perceptions of the image, as well as the processing (cognition) are different each time the image is seen and different for each viewer. In particular the information retrieved from the image can differ enormously for different brains.So usually one says that one has to learn how to read a painting in order to be able to estimate its full depth. This is some kind of decoding.

Our art work is a contemplation about these cognitive pitfalls. In particular we were fascinated by the conceptional implications of Hanjie games, where it takes some puzzling in order to be able to see an image in full display/depth (see this e.g. this link for examples). This is in stark contrast to our world, in which we are bombarded with images so that we even develop "blocking" mechanisms for our visual perception. (Just go hiking in the woods and watch what happenes if you come back to bright big city).

Another interesting aspect of the Hanjie games is the question, wether the brainwork related to the coding of the images, belongs to the image itself or not. For us this is definitely the case. This kind of brainwork for coding a Hanjie game is somewhat similar to the brainwork of a painter developping the composition of a painting. Here the visual information (for example the view onto a collection of things) is adapted to some kind of meta scheme (e.g. how to compose ("code") a collection of things into a still life). For the Hanjie games there exists no unique way to find a unique solving procedure for a given image. It is not straightforward to find such a procedure and the image has to be altered sometimes in order to find it (in fact it is easy to find images where no unique solving algorithm/procedures exists (-> e.g. 2x2 checkerboard)). So again similar as for the painter: in Hanjie a view onto a collection of things (admittingly in very low resolution :-)) has to be adapted according to a meta scheme. Or in short: composition can be interpreted as a coding process.

For radonge there exists a unique algorithm. This can be proven (proof is sort of easy) and thats why we created this game in this form. So the image need not to be adapted and the composition (if we assume given image data) is fixed. Math is giving the meta-scheme. And you have to learn how to read the image. You have to "decode".

Hidden above is an image of the austrian mathematician Johann Radon encoded in a 29x29 radonge. It will take you probably quite a while until you can see it.....:-)

A tip: Try to find first all lines with no black pixels. If you are too impatient: The solution of this particular 29x29 puzzle is >>here.

Instead of Johann Radon you can use your own image, called e.g. BEMYVALENTINE.gif . We set the resolution to maximal 37x37 pixels. You have to download the .jar and insert it into a website with the command:

<br/> <applet code="RadongeApplet" archive="radonge.jar" width="500" height="500" mayscript="true">
< param name="image" value="BEMYVALENTINE.gif" >
</applet><br/>
&copy of applet <bold>radonge</bold>: <A HREF="http://www.daytar.de">daytar. </A ><br/>
daytar is not responsible for the image.<br/> daytar assumes no liability for any consequences of the use of radonge.<br/>

>>back to radonge page