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.

Snakes from Cristóbal Vila on Vimeo.

Indra’s Web, is based on a  buddhist spiritual metaphor of a web of consciousness connecting all life with each point in the web reflecting all the others. I first became aware of this concept through the book Indra’s Pearls – the vision of Felix Klein. The book uses the metaphor to describe Felix Kleins work which is somewhat difficult to understand without a decent mathematical background.

I chose to use an Apollonian gasket (which is derived from a Kleinian Group – so named after Klein of course) for the artwork for Renas CD. I took some liberties and remixed the Apollonian gasket for the CD face. The CD fits inside a perfect circle created from the same design which covers the inside three panels – this conceptually embodies the concept of the “one point containing & reflecting all others” See images below

For the cover of the cd I did a remix and created an action in photoshop and transformed the scale of the gasket dropping the transparency a little every time. I then overlaid some transparent 3D fractals I created using Xenodream.

I am going into detail because a number of people have asked me how I did this.

Below you can see the long view of the inside of the digipack containing the larger gasket which encapsulates the cd.

And finally the back cover – with the famous bubble chamber neutrino image as a background texture and a couple of images from the processing application I coded.

Purchase this cd here

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.

Image Index | Project Index | Extra Images in an Animation

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.

[Birth] [Life] [Death]

Birth

Life

Death

Using the mxwendler mediaserver a team of designers, 3d artists and projection artists has given new life to the enigmatic Galerie der Gegenwart in Hamburg – Described as “if a house could dream”

555 KUBIK_ extended version from urbanscreen on Vimeo.

In 1956 György Ligeti composed “Artikulation” after moving to Cologne into the same building as sound pioneers Karlheinz Stockhausen and Gottfried Michael Koenig. While its reported that he was highly influenced by the crazy electronic sounds he heard coming out of this building this is one of only two electronic pieces he composed before returning back to the intrumental medium.

The liner notes for the score provide an explanation for what’s going on in the music:

The piece is called ‘Artikulation’ because in this sense an artificial language is articulated: question and answer, high and low voices, polyglot speaking and interruptions, impulsive outbreaks and humor, charring and whispering.

This is classified in the “Discretization” class of Musical Analysis, where the  process of analysis often involves breaking the piece down into relatively simpler and smaller parts. Often, the way these parts fit together and interact with each other is then examined in different contexts.

24 years later (1970) Rainer Wehinger created a “Hörpartitur” or “score for listening” for the piece, representing different sonorous effects with specific graphic symbols much like a transcription. Which is shown below. While the piece already had a score – this visual score can be considered a more user friendly version which focuses on the main sonic charectaristics instead of traditional elements like discrete pitches and symbols.

To realize this in a score, Wehinger used a timeline measured in seconds, and used shapes and colors instead of notes on a staff. He used dots for impulses and combs for noise. He used different colors to represent variations in timbre and pitch.

For a number of years this has existed on record and then later cd – and now finally on the internet as someone scanned the pages, synced it to the music and added a “current position” bar.

I wanted a nice vector line file of one of my favorite crop circles – the 2004 Silbury Hill “mayan” cropcircle so I sat down to recreate this from a series of files I found through google images. I also learned a lot about illustrator along the way including how to turn paths into guides and then to use smart guides to constrain all the new points I added.

Hyper Crop Circle reconstruction from Kris Northern on Vimeo.

The music is Blaerg and you should definitely check his amazing forward thinking intelligent breakcore at

http://fromthegut.org/blaerg/

Having a phone that takes decent pictures adds a whole new level of geekiness to my life: allowing me to take pictures of things  that I see but would normally forget 2 seconds after seeing -  including really cool geeky things. Below are all the images I’ve collected in the past two months – sort of organized by theme from geometric math nerd into music nerd stuff.

Probably a fibonacci sequence dictating the width and height of the rectangles. Seen on an album cover.

6 point star tetrahedral Cymatic image created by sending sound through 1-2mm of water.

Alisha found this spirograph set on the street and did the first version of this image.

Ice crystals at Punchbowl Falls.

Bats at the library by the amazing Brian Lies, everyone knows bats like the golden mean.

Nerd Wall Graffiti: calling out another nerd who messed up the ordering of classes & orders on his wall graffiti.

Looking at a table runner on my friend Liz & Jazzes place through a pint glass. Perspective meets refractive index.

Wicked broken plasma screen – Was tempted to buy this as art but in the end decided it was a waste of electricity.

Alisha and I were at Ikea and couldnt resist. Ideally I would go with a nice camera and explore the textures.

If you turn the indie rock cred knob past 7 you start wearing tight jeans and retarded sunglasses.

The studio session with my good buddy Rubin (starflounder)

Beau killing it at Sol Invictus. No really Beau… its DEAD you can stop killing it.

Skoi at synchromystic

Alisha loving on an Otari Tape deck.

I decided I wanted to do a test run to see if I could find any good textures in macro photographs of soap bubbles and I had moderate sucess – there were indeed some cool photos but I had to move and focus quick and due to the lighting which was a lightbulb with tin foil behind it to disperse the light – I was only able to shoot in f2.8 which as you can see leaves a very intense depth of field. I will be making a more serious attempt at addressing all the limitations I ran into this shoot in the near future based onthis article.

 view More Macro Photos of Soap Bubbles

HD 3D Fractal Animation Study from Kris Northern on Vimeo.

This is a test render for a much longer piece Im working on which is currently rendering. I decided that I liked the end of this video the most and sought to replicate that sort of tweakery – So far the new animation is at frame 480 of 3200! It’s going to take a little while =)