These Mind-Blowing Recreations of Famous Artworks Are Made With Only Thread—and an Algorithm That Runs Over 2 Billion Calculations

What do you get when art meets math and computer programming? If
you’re Ani Abakumova, what you get
are stunning replicas of art historical masterpieces made from
colored thread. The 32-year-old Russian artist developed the
technique in conjunction with her husband, Andrey Abakumova, a
talented mathematician who uses an algorithm to generate patterns
for recreating printed or painted images in this unique medium.

“Without a computer program, it would not be possible for the
human eye to create something like this,” Abakumova
told Story Trender. “My
program analyzes millions of possibilities of how to place the
threads and when it finds the result that best matches the
photograph, it stops counting.”

Andrey’s algorithm makes some 2 billion calculations in order to
produce a pattern for each work. Thanks to the computer’s
instructions, Abakumova knows just how to have the different
threads overlap to recreate famous works of art such as Johannes
Vermeer’s The Girl With the Pearl Earring or Leonardo
da Vinci’s Mona Lisa.

The effect is remarkable. Black, white, yellow, red, and green
threads, crisscrossing over one another and winding around nails
hammered around the edge of a circular plywood board, somehow come
together to form a realistic approximation of an Old Master. Each
piece takes hours to make, the string passing cross the piece as
many as 8,000 times in order to create the final image. Unspooled,
according to Awesomebyte, one
of Abakumova’s artworks could stretch as long a two-and-a-half
miles—and she’s hoping to make even bigger pieces in the
future.

The husband and wife duo were inspired by new media artist
Petros Vrellis, who began experimenting in knitted algorithmic art in
2016. Abakumova got her start working in black thread,
branching out to include color last fall. She claims to be the
first in her field to have done so. (Her work has come a long way.)

“I am the first one to do this with colored thread instead of
just black,” she added. “I enjoy seeing how mathematics can help
create beautiful things.”

Watch photos and a video of the artist at work:

The post These Mind-Blowing Recreations of Famous Artworks
Are Made With Only Thread—and an Algorithm That Runs Over 2 Billion
Calculations appeared first on artnet News.