Portraits Made With a Single Unbroken Line

Reddit user who calls himself “renbo” shared some of his unique artwork on the social news site yesterday. The Redditor draws portraits that consist of single unbroken line that neither crosses over or ends. It’s just one long loop. It’s pretty amazing and reminds me of Kumi Yamashita’s work that I shared recently.

For renbo it’s a kind of meditation. “It puts my brain in a good place, completely random and I don’t know where I will go next”, says the artist.

There is actually a name for this kind of art – it’s called TSP Art, because it’s constructed by solving instances of the classic computer science algorithmic problem called the Traveling Salesman Problem.

The Travelling Salesman Problem describes a salesman who must travel between N cities. The order in which he does so is unimportant, provided he visits each one during his trip, and finishes in his starting location. The principal exponent of TSP art and one of the leading innovators in optimization art in general, is Robert Bosch, a professor of Mathematics at Oberlin College, Ohio, the U.S.

Here are some more single-line artwork made by Robert Bosch. However, unlike renbo, these are all computer generated.

[via Neatorama]