About Rodd

Rodd Halstead: Data Scientist and Generative Artist

Born in Texas, Raised in Thailand and Hawaii

Lives & works in Boston, MA

Photography

My interest in photography started in high school, where I shot BW photos for the school newspaper and year book. There were no computers and we did all our own darkroom work (developing film and printing images). My camera then and for many years after was a 1960s vintage Nikkormat SLR.

I moved to digital in 2002, and now have a couple cameras and photo printers. Digital photography is liberating, and has greatly changed the way I use photography to document and explore the world.

Generative and Fractal Art

I think of my mathematical and computer graphic work as primarily photographic in nature. In particular, images of the Mandelbrot set (and other fractals) are like windows looking in on fantastic island worlds, which have real and fixed (although infinitely deep and repeating) geographies.

MidJourney AI Generated Images

My journey into generative art has recently expanded into the fascinating realm of AI text-to-image generation. There are many AI image generators. Midjourney is an amazing standout. This new medium feels like a natural extension of my photographic and fractal explorations, allowing me to use language as a prompt to unveil new visual dimensions and sculpt entirely new images from the digital ether of the Internet.

This process is both a collaboration and an experiment, pushing the boundaries of what I can "see" and "create," often yielding dreamlike qualities and merging disparate elements with unexpected beauty, much like discovering a new, impossible landscape through a lens or an algorithm.