I dont know what rock I’ve been hiding under but I just discovered Matt Shlian and his amazing paper sculptures through Ghostly Internationals tweet (@ghostly) about a project they are working on together, Which I will definitely be looking out for. After watching the video posted below I couldn’t help but check out the rest of his works, talks and art that is available online. Very impressed with his geek cred, he gave a Ted talk, was recently featured in Data Flow 2 & Papercraft – both which are published by the amazing Gestalten, and of course his work with Ghostly. Check out the video, and a few of his works below and then be sure to sign up for the RSS feed for his blog.
The folks over at Dentsu London & Berg have released this short about the process behind their awesome 3d model light painting using stop motion and an Ipad.
I stumbled across the “Inside Insides” blog today which seems to feature various fruits and vegetables as seen by slices through Magnetic Resonance Imaging. Be sure to check out the whole site here
I watched Vanessa Goulds amazing documentary on Origami called “Between the Folds” recently. (it’s availble on Instant Watch for you netflix junkies) While there are many great interviews with inspired folders Chris K Palmers work really stood out to me. Particularily his description of the process involved in his “Flower Towers” which unfortunately is missing from his vimeo post. Check the documentary for that.
However you do get to see some of the amazing recusrive geometry in the video.
I’ve been following Evan Roths’ next level work for a minute now. Basically his software uses blob detection and tracks the motion of a graffiti artists pen,brush,can, marker or what have you and maps the motion into 3d space. Hes created a special open source markup language for this called GML (graffiti markup language) which stores all the data for motion, angle, pressure in an XML file. In the video you can see him recording the data using what looks like just the built in webcam on the macbook pro. This video shows that you can further recreate the tag with composite modeling like Shapeways. I am looking forward to really delving into this in the future with OSC to use tags to control sound objects so we can hear what graffiti sounds like.
Evan Roth has just launched a new project that is currently on exhibition at the Kunsthalle Museum. It’s a 3D printed data visualization of a 7 second tag, frozen in time.
I recently re-licensed a couple of my fractals for elementary school math books and decided it was time to revisit the old fractal program and see if I could come up with some new designs. I also discovered a neat batch rendering window which I hadnt noticed before which really helps me to crank out variations. Feel free to contact me if you would like to license any of these images.
It’s hard to trace where this fascination come obsession really started for me; from my early childhood I’ve been a fan of MC Escher and the way he conveys mathematical concepts through highly precise and ultimately unforgiving mediums such as lithography. As I’ve grown older and subsequently geekier I’ve come to understand more of the ideas that underlie MC Eschers work and meanwhile playing with my own process oriented art including the ever evolving window art Ive been doing, which while is nowhere near the same caliber it still really requires you to plan things out so you don’t make a royal mess of things.
Line art study for the window
Orcas – window with spraypaint – for photos detailing the process click the photo
Since I’ve been using line art for my windows, lately I’ve been really taken with woodblock cuts, particularly the late 18th century Flammarion woodblock which depicts a man poking his head through the sky to see the inner workings of the universe (as depicted by the wheel within the wheel)
the caption in french stating “A missionary of the Middle Ages tells that he had found the point where the sky and the Earth touched…”
As I have a shared love for this print with my friend/ music partner Rubin I decided I would remix / redraw this piece to paint on a window and subsequently like any true nerd would, decided to research the subject and see what else was out there. Of course there is the piece that Rubin first sent to me – Tuefels Dudelsack which is an amazingly executed, albiet twisted, woodcut of a furry owly demon playing a human head as a bagpipe. I’ve only managed to discover a few pieces of information about this woodcut (though I plan on digging deeper when time allows) The name translates in german to Devils Bagpipe, and it is a satirical cartoon depicting the devil playing a bagpipe made of Martin Luthers head.
A few other favorites include these three – Ive chosen to ommit “The sale of indulgences” woodcut because I fear I would want to write a whole post on that alone and end up sidetracked… but if you are the sort that is familiar with the Catholic church selling indulgences thereby bringing the printing press to popularity I would recommend check the link out.
So we recently went to the MC Escher exibit when it was here in Portland and what I loved most about it was the chronological ordering of his work and through the years you could see him work with various media and really refine his craft. I realized how many years he worked to get it down to the razor sharp cleanliness we’ve all come to know. There were also a number of studies which were my favorite part of his work as it shows the steps involved and thereby makes the whole thing more human and inspiring. While gaurds were looking the other way I had to sneak this photo of a study of his geometric progression study for angels and demons.
Additionally I checked out which of his pieces might translate into a nice window painting to adorn my house and at first thought the ants & mobius strip piece would translate nicely though would be an insane amount of work as there are soooooooo many lines.
If i ever feel up for it theres always the final piece MC Escher did before parting our mortal realm – Snakes which is a three color lithograph – which was highly efficient in that it only created blocks for 1/3 of the image and rotated them to create the whole thing. If only I could do the same for my process. I plan to someday paint this onto a circular piece of glass which I will then use as a table.
Lastly while doing this research I stumbled upon this 3d representation of Snakes which is really cool and reminds me of playing with xenodream.
As a long fan of Ernst Haeckels work Kunstformen Der Natur – the forms of nature it was a real treat to find this Michael Hansmeyers platonic project this morning. Conceived in Processing, inspired by Ernst Haeckel, this project explores 3 dimensional subdivisions of topographic models recursively applying the subdivision process to a source form, which is restricted to one of the five platonic solids. A mouthful for you non-nerds I’m sure but the results speak for themselves.
I wish I could find more info on this but all I was able to dig up what few details are on humanchaos77′s flickr stream.
These appear to be 3d animations of plots of recorded ECG data of the human heart in three different stages of life where the line of recorded data passes through follows a beautiful trajectory through a nonlinear attractor.
