SAB

Artist

SAB · sabrigokmen.com/spiromorphs ↗

Raster

raster.art/artist/sab ↗

Practice

Generative art, computational design, parametric modeling, digital fabrication, and architectural research

Now

Assistant Professor and Graduate Program Director for the MS in Architecture at UNC Charlotte

In the set

Spiromorphs ↗ · 200 editions

Links

Full bibliography ↗

SAB’s practice joins generative image-making to a longer investigation of morphology, fabrication, and architectural systems. UNC Charlotte describes Sabri Gökmen as a computational designer, researcher, and educator whose work spans parametric modeling, generative art, digital fabrication, software development, cultural heritage, and public art.¹ This breadth matters for reading Spiromorphs. The project is not an isolated experiment in digital ornament, but a compact expression of an established interest in how simple procedures generate differentiated structures.

Gökmen trained in architecture and design computation, completing a master’s degree and doctorate at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His doctoral research revisited Goethe’s morphological writings and explored their computational application to architectural form and symmetry.¹ That intellectual background places transformation ahead of static representation. Form becomes something produced through relations, repetitions, and opposing tendencies.

Drawing as a recursive event

Released through Art Blocks Factory on 10 December 2021, Spiromorphs comprises exactly 200 editions.² Across the series, lines curl, overlap, tighten, and disperse into configurations that can suggest coils, petals, knots, shells, or diagrammatic organisms. These associations remain provisional. The images do not illustrate a single natural object. They establish conditions in which repeated geometric actions begin to resemble growth.

The title combines the language of spirals with morphology, the study of form and transformation. That pairing echoes Gökmen’s research into morphogenesis, where computational rules organize trajectories and structural networks. His published work on leaf venation describes a generative process in which customizable inputs and density maps produce anisotropic patterns that can be extended over surfaces and prepared for fabrication.³ Spiromorphs operates in a different medium, yet shares the same central proposition: controlled rules can produce outcomes whose complexity exceeds the apparent simplicity of their ingredients.

Live on Art Blocks: spiromorphs-by-sab ↗

From structure to image

Gökmen’s movement between screen-based systems and physical construction gives the series a particular spatial charge. His public sculpture Calyx, installed at the University of Rochester in 2015, is a twelve-foot steel structure shaped by computationally generated venation.⁴ In that work, algorithmic growth became an architectural presence. In Spiromorphs, related concerns are compressed into the pictorial plane, where density, enclosure, and overlap imply depth without requiring fabrication.

This continuity also clarifies the role of ornament. Gökmen’s computational analysis of Anatolian Seljuk muqarnas uses photogrammetry, three-dimensional modeling, symmetry, and graph theory to study patterned geometric layers and branching axes.⁵ Such research treats ornament as organized knowledge rather than surface excess. Spiromorphs similarly asks viewers to attend to patterned difference. Each edition belongs to one system, but no output functions merely as a substitute for another.

Gökmen has also carried this approach into teaching. The OCCA installation at Rezan Has Museum developed through physical form-finding, parametric modeling, and digital fabrication, translating curvilinear surfaces into flat components for assembly.⁶ A studio project titled Ornament is Prime likewise reconsidered ornament as an integral component of architectural and spatial design.⁷ These projects supply a broader context for the looping structures of Spiromorphs: computation operates not simply as a production tool, but as a means of examining how form differentiates, connects, and acquires coherence.

The series therefore sits productively between drawing, code, and architectural speculation. Its looping marks are immediately legible as graphic events, while their systematic variation encourages slower comparison across the full set. The 200 editions make repetition visible as a method of inquiry. SAB’s achievement lies in preserving the clarity of the rule while allowing each image to register as a distinct, unresolved morphology.

Bibliography

The references cited in this essay are listed below. For the complete bibliography see the SAB links page ↗.