AI Infinity

John Maeda has a particular affection for this image, as it was the first one that he coded in PostScript programming language, after a long hiatus away from computer programming. He made it shortly after being asked by his typography teacher what he would do with his life. His response was that he wanted to become a classical Swiss-style typographer like the teacher — and a master of letterpress. The teacher responded kindly but harshly - “Idiot! You are young. Do something young with yourself. The classics will still be there when you are old.”

Maeda took that as direction to start using the computer again. He was surprised by how the computer could do so much at the call of a few lines of code. It would just keep going and going, until infinity. Maeda made a piece for the NeXT computer that drew an infinite loop. It never stopped — unless one made it stop, of course. He stopped the image above at the 10,000th loop stroke.

Maeda showed the image to his professor. The teacher smiled and told him to look at the work of Karl Gerstner, and to learn from him. Twenty years later, Maeda was standing on a commencement stage at Rhode Island School of Design, honouring him with an honorary degree. As such this image is very meaningful to the artist, even after many years, it now represents his life coming “full circle.”