Genesis of “The Cosmic Tree of Life” A High Resolution Digital Painting by Roger Ferragallo

In the 1950s, I had also been influenced by astronomer Fred Hoyle (1915–2001) who invoked the “Anthropic Principle,” a concept actually named later in 1972. Anthropic ideas come in several humanistic flavors that give reason to believe life had to emerge because beings like us are here as conscious observers. Hoyle also believed that the cosmic pervasiveness of carbon-based life-forms on our planet were seeded by comets and asteroids. Astrobiology today vindicates Hoyle because we observe hundreds of elemental compounds permeating interstellar space that are products of supernovae. It has been proven comets and asteroids are known to carry organic molecules and other organic materials, together with water.

Hoyle’s greatest scientific achievement was discovering nucleosynthesis, the process that happens inside stars to create most of the elements lighter than iron, and that which happens via supernovae to create all the elements heavier than iron. Supernovae are also responsible for distributing the elements throughout interstellar space. Hoyle vigorously fostered a steady state universe rather than one born from a single explosion 14 billion years ago. He went on to strongly put down advocates of an instant creation by derisively coining their explosion theory a “Big Bang.” He fought against the Big Bang theory for the remainder of his life.

My first digital works began in the mid 1980s with the advent of desktop PC computers together with their large light screens, software tools, and wide color palettes. After a learning period with the daunting MS-DOS language, the appearance of “True Image-Targa Tips” software tools and its brilliant color palette made it possible to proceed with my first ‘light’ stereoscopic paintings.

Why did I choose Stereoscopic Space?

This choice was influenced by choices made in the prior decade of the 1970s. In 1972, I launched a series of unique, very large (historic) stereoscopic acrylic canvases that flourished until about the time computers began appearing. The acrylic works required "Cross-eye Free-vision” real-time viewing, which allowed viewing the painting in 3D without glasses. With the advent of computers, the digital medium set the stage for me to opportunely paint with light my first digital cosmic works (1986–96) within the reality of 3D stereoscopic space. The stereo-space methodology is amply described and illustrated in my published “Stereo Manifesto” in 1972 and my stereo painting article in the Leonardo International Journal “On Stereoscopic Painting” in 1974.

Computers provided a revolutionary new medium in the 1980s that stunned me. I immediately deemed them ‘light generators’ because of my deep interest in the art of light during my studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1948–53). What made this cosmic series possible was the appearance of the desktop computer and digital software designed for artists. Most significant was Truevision’s introduction of the Targa Videographics Card, in 1987, that launched a fully fleshed paint program called Targa-tips. It supported 24-bit color before it was available in the TIFF format. This early software provided impressive luminal paint and drawing tools to create a variety of rudimentary geometric lines, planes, circles, etc., that could be shaped, modified, and fashioned at will, as they appeared in 3D space on my monitor screen. Fortunately, the original digital mouse tool had morphed into a hand held stylus, thanks to Apple in 1979 and Wacom’s cordless in 1984. These styluses acted as both pen and brush along with a color ‘light’ palette arrayed to satisfy my joy of painting my cosmic themes with light. Thus, I proceeded with my series of sixty stereoscopic cosmic paintings.

The entire series of sixty stereoscopic works were done without mathematics or algorithms. The light paintings with their 3D effects, were produced by maneuvering by hand, dual ‘right-left’ constructed and painted visual objects, viewed directly on my monitor screen with fixated naked eye, cross-sight free-vision. With stylus in hand, I was able to dynamically move, position, and pose objects in deep 3D space with exacting precision. Here was an enchanting newfound aesthetic experience that achieved a certain spatial magic by virtually transforming a small 14″ monitor screen into the larger realm of infinite space. It was memorable, at the start, as if my cosmic themes were emerging from the dark mystique of interstellar space itself. This unique series of stereoscopic works gave voice to the awe and wonder I felt throughout the period (1986–95).

Each of the objects and painted forms are positioned to appear in stereoscopic 3D space by moving left-right eye-paired elements horizontally in relation to each other, illustrated in my graph paper sketches. To see the 3D effects in my stereo paintings, they must be viewed using the cross-sight free-vision technique rather than the straight-stare parallel-vision technique.

Thus the process of cross-sight free-vision with the new digital medium involved a real-time dynamic process that made it possible to paint with photonic light my sixty-plus cosmic works.

cross-sight free-vision (unlimited scale of stereo pair artwork)

straight-stare parallel-vision (paired objects cannot exceed the separation distance between human eyes)

In Japan, it is common for school children to be taught, at an early age, to view both parallel and cross-view stereo pairs. Parallel viewing, using the straight-stare parallel-vision technique, comes into play for small stereo artworks comprised of small repeated shapes. Because of the limits of the technique, the paired objects cannot exceed the separation distance between human eyes, or about 2 and 1⁄4 inches. Conversely, the cross-sight free-vision method has no dual eye separation limitation whatsoever. With the cross-sight technique, there is no limit to the size or scale of a work of art. That is why all of my stereo work, both small and large, exclusively utilizes the cross-sight viewing technique.

Normal stereovision automatically occurs in our brain when we focus on any object, near or far, in space with both of our eyes open. One can create objects on a sheet of paper that, in effect, make it possible to be viewed stereoscopically. The mind — the cyclopean eye — remarkably fuses two disparate left/right images to see them as one 3D reality. This great discovery was made by Charles Wheatstone in 1838. Wheatstone designed a device with two small frontal mirrors that reflect two hand drawn left and right disparate images that the brain fuses into one stereo reality.

I single out the painting Nova Genesis because it personifies all seven works at a time I could, at last, paint cosmic works in flowing photonic color and light. I would go on to widely exhibit this series locally and around the country, printing them to canvas cloth or archival museum paper. I also committed several paintings to large Fujichrome transparencies, illuminated from the rear by enclosure within large metal light boxes.

Nova Genesis, thematically, had its anthropic origin in explosive supernovae that make possible the wonder and emergence of life as we know it. Supernovae, particularly, when they cataclysmically implode and explode, make possible the metallicity of planets and, in our instance, biogenetic evolution. When a Type II supernova star core collapses—it must have more than eight times the mass of our Sun—it reaches a criticality that no force in the universe can stop. An iron red core catastrophically implodes and instantaneously explodes to disperse molecular clouds of dust, cosmic rays, and complex organic elements into the depths of interstellar space. In a sense, it showers its fertile elemental contents to plow the circumstellar vastness of the galactic medium. They are the elements that make up stars, planets, and all life. Stars and supernovae underlie all the elements in the Periodic Table, without which DNA, nor life as we know it, would exist in our Milky Way. Within a galaxy, supernovae are few and far between.

A recent supernova found in a satellite galaxy to our Milky Way, the Large Magellanic Cloud, happened on February 23, 1987 (left), while the last to explode inside our Milky Way was witnessed by Johannes Kepler in 1604. Its remnants can still be seen today (right).

The seven larger scale paintings had served me well and were, by 1998–99, but cosmic threads in search of a broader thematic holism. It was an insightful moment—the cosmic subject too compelling and huge to contain the busy voices crowding my mind. The millennium air materialized into a photonic vision of a more wide-ranging visual vocabulary that would celebrate the vastness and complexity of the universe we observe! As a result, I chose my next painting to embrace a larger canvas ‘stage’ and to explore a more far-reaching comprehensive vision.

I proceeded with The Universe Knew We Were Coming.

The Universe Knew We Were Coming painting was conceived as a holistic bio-friendly cosmology to inspire a new artistic genre towards an art-science that could best be expressed through the all embracing luminal digital language. I could now proceed with a plethora of cosmic themes on a larger digital stage to paint with photonic light elements that speak to life, evolution, world, and universe. Indeed, our evolution gives us license to affirm the “universe knew we were coming” (Dyson) because “we are here as ‘conscious’ anthropic witnesses,” given the universal agency of cosmic fine-tuned physical constants and the realities of galaxies and supernovae. Accordingly, I began with a larger, more inclusive, 108 megapixel, 48″ × 24″ cosmic landscape, that arose from the unconscious to explore the mystery of conscious existence.

It was a humbling moment to gaze into the mysterious frigid darkness and heat from the colossus of galactic interstellar space to awaken the cathode of electronic light, universe, and mind. The photonic medium made it possible to magically circum-zoom the depths of interstellar space on my now 21″ cathode monitor with luminal imagery at all spatial micro-macro scales. I began The Universe Knew We Were Coming in November 1988. The following images are close-ups from the painting.

New science and philosophical ideas a constant driving force, I pondered the expressive possibilities that rest within the revolution of computers and their radiant screens along with the appearance of larger quality screens seen at various computer expositions. In 1999, liquid crystal displays and brilliant plasma screens emerged approaching 40″ to 50″, giving heart to all the resolution that I was pouring into my work. I found improved digital tools with a variety hand stylus brushes and luminal color palettes with ever increasing color depth that dazzled me.

With “The Universe Knew…” painting completed in 2001, I looked to print this work to stretched canvas since I located, on line, a company specializing in a process called Digitograph that offered printing using oil base dyes, electrically fixed to Mylar, sealed on a stretched canvas. My email to the Digitograph Studio follows:

The multi-year process of creating The Universe Knew We Were Coming caused me to recognize the digital constant circum-zoom process contained the seeds of a breakthrough methodology. The digital process I employed from the early 1990s led me to fluidly work with tablet wand in hand through years of relentless panning and deep zooming luminal forms across many micro-macro scales of magnitude. Thus I became acutely aware of the dynamic nature of painting with light, given the digital medium with its instant immediacy to modify color, form, imagery, and meaning within the zoom depths of macro-micro space. My electronic screen triggered me to view space differently—as if I were sky diving—breaking the picture frame inward and outward bound into self similar fractal image spatial domains of cosmic discovery to explore a broader visual language capable of expressing extraordinary new science and philosophical ideas to breach size, scale, aesthetic distance, and time. In a flash of insight, I grasped the broader aesthetic of a new cosmic work!

It was a startling awakening that shed an avalanche of initiatives: I came face to face with the picture of a digital medium that would make possible interaction and involvement of both viewer and artist. I sensed a participatory concept at hand that could breach the holy grail of closing the aesthetic distance between the observer and painted object. Here was an aesthetic born from a light medium I felt must be viewed in the same emissive photonic light from which it was painted! Furthermore, the digital process of years of constant circum-zoom-panning would have causal expressive effect. I envisioned audiences who would actively participate and circum-zoom this new work on large plasma screens with hand control devices that began appearing in the marketplace at computer expositions.

Today, the touch of two fingers on mobile phone screens reaches the planet through a cloud of algorithms.

Thus I proceeded with the painting as a comprehensive high resolution work of cosmic exploration and discovery within the practice of imagery and metaphor as an artist. Art and Science consciously partner to explore the enigmatic universe. Why do we stardust beings, at the fulcrum of billions of years of unique evolution, stand on this infinitesimal mote of rock, water, and soil with the power of mind in the twenty-first century driven to investigate the vast universe we consciously create? To what end, we ask? The gift of life appears poised as cosmic imperative to galactic flight into the solar system and beyond interstellar space. What is to be rendered with image and metaphor to subsume the Anthropic Principle, fundamental parameters, constants, and laws? These have brought us to the brink of searching entanglement physics and the quandary of quantum mechanics relating to the mystery of consciousness, evolution, science, and cosmology. My background in art history gave inspiration and voice to historic master painters who influenced me as I began to develop and paint The Cosmic Tree of Life.

Hieronymus Bosch, the Dutch Province master, with his triptych, The Garden of Earthly Delights, held a powerful attraction that inevitably resonated with the Tree of Life, having seen the huge original in Spain in 1971. Bosch lived in an era of unremitting religiosity as expressed in his work. Today, we harbor modern science and survey the vast galactic universe that we, stardust beings, take the measure of with awe and astonishment.

The CTOL painting, Model 1, begun in 2002, remained thematically largely unchanged from its 1994 Synaptic Fire… origin. I however worked its spatial cosmic avenues and byways with high resolution pixel and image additives for more than a year. I plowed its mysterious elements with emergent augmentation: undulating forms became luminous high resolution cosmic plasmas with pregnant gamma ray galactic dust clouds showering elements and organic molecules into the depths of interstellar space. The skeletal tree imagery of branching cosmic tendrils personifies spatial fractal patterns, structures and similitude at all scales committed to life, creativity, and the quantum ‘wildness’ of an enigmatic colossus cosmos.

In this vein, I introduced a mystic dual flight metaphor, originally founded in 1953, that continues to populate most of my cosmic paintings. Two ‘bodies’ appear in cosmic co-flight as if a binary pair in some mystical dance of flight and motion. Here, one views the edge on view of a mysterious galactic nucleus core with outstretched helical stardust wings in flight, entangled with the mighty galactic cluster to find heat and light. In parallel harmony, I evoke humankind in self-similar flight with the core mystery of conscious mind, outspread wings of flesh and blood, to travel the resonant interstellar night, cast in luminal flight.

I began to question and explore within The Cosmic Tree of Life; For what purpose do we, galactic stardust helical beings, entangle with the Final Anthropic Principle that states:

Once the ‘universe’ brings life and intelligence into being, it will continuously evolve and never end.

Life endures an end. The anthropic metaphors that appear in all my cosmic works entrain the beauty of symmetry and principal of least action in interstellar co-flight, the spread of boundless stellar wings as mystery and melody.

The extension to 16⁄9 ratio was added in October 2004. As a result, the painting would go on to grow in scale, size, pixel resolution, and by 2005, measured 23,600 × 11,248 pixels. Enlarging the work led me to adopt new science and other add-on cosmic enhancement and novelty. When I first conceived the Tree of Life, I thought of it as a work I would complete within four years, but this modification caused me to regard the painting as a work in progress that could extend in time as a continuum!

Since when, I mused, must a dynamic additive digital painting end; particularly a work of scale that anticipated new science, invention, and discovery? The digital medium I was employing contained, within itself, unanticipated cause to regard my painting as a digital mural founded on what common software had already discovered—that software, just as websites, can exist as a dynamic living and evolving unit. The Tree of Life painting, by virtue of this extraordinary electronic channel, came to live in my mind as a continuum. I saw clearly the medium itself allows the creator to decide when the work is done because he simply can! I began to see the Cosmic Tree of Life as an ‘additive’ work that would continue living and growing with time.

An email to Niffer Desmond, and my niece Caitlyn Meeks Ferragallo, marks the moment this new aesthetic took hold.

In 2005, webmaster Niffer Desmond, and VR technologist Caitlyn Meeks Ferragallo, wrapped their heads around producing a compact disk featuring interactive controls for the ongoing Tree of Life painting. Niffer and I began a negotiation with Zoomify Inc. president David Urbanic, who enthusiastically embraced the interactive Tree of Life project. Zoomify offered outstanding tools that facilitated deep panning and zooming in real-time. Mr. Urbanic graciously went out of his way to modify his unique software to suit the task of interaction.

The interactive CD included a music sound track (Time Suspension by Cosmic Dreamer) created by my niece Caitlyn who resided in Germany. The CD was released in June 2005 to gather support for the nascent developing digital art interactive medium as I conceived it relative to the Cosmic Tree of Life painting. With Niffer’s aid in designing the interactivity and packaging, the CD was successfully produced in San Francisco. It was also a work that looked with an eye to the plasma screens appearing in the marketplace.

With HIPerWall, I came to understand that digital imagery— photographic, surreal, metaphoric, and abstract—would one day be arrayed in a medium of pure light to substrates without limits on scale or size. The HIPerWall screen gave heart to my unwavering dream of painting with pure photonic light on screens suffused in brilliant plasmas with hues true to the native emissive photonic light in which it was created! The U.C. Irvine screen represented the actuality of arraying groups of interlocked computer-driven emissive luminal display tiles to achieve the grandeur of emissive light and high resolution scale. My computer system, which I had never regarded as anything but a ‘light generator in a box’ when it appeared in 1982, gave rise to cosmic visions that now soared with the onset of large display screens in 2004–05.

I began to view future screens as vast staging arenas for photonic cosmic visions. I could now foresee symphonic, poetic, art/sci murals that could be displayed to one day rival the Cro-Magnon murals at Lascaux, the Sistine Chapel ceiling, the great baroque cathedral domes, modern day stadia extravaganzas, and one day, to be written to the greatest screen of all, the sky! I had become acutely conscious of the digitally driven aesthetic of ‘scalar micro-macro fractal space’ where one envisions a distant forest and, with the wave of a hand, virtually plummet viewers into the virtual branch of a tree to reveal—full screen—a scintillating colored wing of a tiny butterfly, or with equal ease, zoom from a cosmic landscape to the image of a tiny helical sea shell to reveal the breathtaking self-similar coil of the Andromeda spiral galaxy in all its metaphoric mystery and majesty. Indeed, the new millennium brought a breakthrough in screen plasma technology to rival the computer digital revolution that exploded into view with global exponential tempo. Within a period of less than twenty-five years, the birth of the digital medium and display concepts and screens would come as an avalanche!

In 2004, the large work The Universe Knew We Were Coming appeared at Princeton on their 18′ display wall. This was followed by two unanticipated Southern California Universities (UCI and UCSD) in 2005–06 who had created the largest digital light display screens in the world. For me, it was the synchronistic culmination of an aesthetic dream that came to rest with the ongoing Cosmic Tree of Life. If that were not enough, in 2006 GigaPan, a global dynamic zoom panorama image system, appeared as a total surprise. GigaPan was the child of the digital age that fit all the visual parameters I envisioned for The Cosmic Tree of Life mural.