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Basic elements of kolam.  

Basic elements of kolam.  

Source publication
Article
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A 3D Computer Graphical tool was developed for creating "Kolam" patterns of the southern India or Celtic knot patterns in Europe on digitalization of them. The 3D CG pattern consists of six primitive stroke patterns on the six sides of a block (called as PsyKolo3D). A user is able to change the patterns with rotating each block in an array to creat...

Context in source publication

Context 1
... pattern is composed of the simple patterns and any complicated Kolam pattern is formed with a single stroke or multi-stroke as a cycle pattern(s). Figure 1 shows six kinds of basic patterns of Kolam. A point, at which a stroke of a basic pattern goes to a neighbor basic pattern, is called as a connecting terminal. ...

Citations

... Kawai et al [1] have used tiles to construct kolams. Other researchers in Computer Science have also mentioned tiles. ...
... Archaeologically speaking, the design in Figure 6 has evolved into the design in Figure 7, in course of time. Kawai et al [1], use six kinds of tiles (16 if rotation is not allowed) and they are shown in Figure 8. The design in Figure 7 uses an empty tile, a tile not found in Figure 8. ...
... We will call such points attraction points. (Kawai et al [1] call them as "connecting terminals".) We will consider that each kind of tile is supposed to have a circle in it but the attraction points attract and change the circle into different shapes. ...
Preprint
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It will be shown in this paper that a sign in a seal of the Indus Valley Civilization (IVC) (3200 BC-1700 BC) is formed by overlapping two designs of the Dravidian art form called kōlam. This art form is practiced to this day in South India. Because a paper was presented at a recent conference [2] by the author, on the mathematical properties of kolam, it has been possible for the author to formulate a definition of a kolam and establish that the design, mentioned above, is a kolam, in spite of some variations that possibly happened during the long passage of time. It will also be shown that another sign is also a kolam design, after "restoring" changes that possibly happened during handling the seal or reproducing the sign. The progressive period of IVC when the seals were in use is also known as the Harappan period or Harappan Civilization, after the name of a present day town, Harappa, situated near the site of one of the larger cities of IVC. The seals are small in size and carry pictures and/or linear sequences of signs. According to Lawler [3], rudimentary signs began to appear by 3200 BCE, began to diminish by 1900 BCE and vanished entirely by 1700 BCE. These signs have been considered to be a script for a long time. Many have attempted to decipher the seals but there has been no general consensus to accept the "decipherments". A paper in 2004 put forth the idea that the sign sequences do not encode speech but possibly had religious, political or social functions or were just memory aids. In this paper, no attempt to decipher the message in any seal and no attempt to find out how any sign should be read will be made. The most popular proposal for the language of the seals has been Proto-Dravidian and this proposal is called the Dravidian Hypothesis. This paper could possibly lend credence to this hypothesis.
... Ascher (2002) offers a succinct overview of their research. Still more recently, various Japanese scholars have studied various technical features of kolam patterns, including their use in education (Kawai et al., 2006; Nagata and Robinson, 2006; Nagata, 2006), and schemes for growing tessellations via pattern pasting (Robinson, 2006). Ishimoto (2006) used knot theory in an attempt to solve the search problem of how many possible single-loop kolam patterns can exist in a diamond dot matrix of a given size. ...
Article
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The kolam is a traditional hand-drawn art form in Tamil Nadu and South India comprised of many subfamilies. Kolam patterns are most commonly drawn with chalk or rice powder by women on the thresholds of homes and temples and are of significant cultural importance in Tamil society. Academic investigations of Kolam patterns have used many different terms for different kolam pattern types. I introduce a global typology of kolam types, and present an extension to the square loop kolam (SLK) patterns studied in the past. Square loop kolam patterns are composed of an initial orthogonal matrix of dots, defining a space around which curving lines are drawn to complete one or many loops. SLK patterns can be decomposed into the gestures made by the artist's hand, and previous studies have created sequential languages to represent SLK patterns. Prior kolam languages used a limited gestural lexicon and could not account for the diversity of SLK patterns produced by artists. The current paper introduces an expanded sequential gestural lexicon for square loop kolams, and describes a system for the digitization of SLK patterns using this expanded and expandable language.