Archives for the ‘no boxes!’ Category

1923 aka Heaven – Max Hattler

1923 aka Heaven - Max Hattler/><br /><em>1923 aka Heaven – Max Hattler</em></p>
<p>The connections between so called outsider art and certain forms of generative/computational art can be intrinsic and implicit. The self-referential motifs and mytho-mathematic patterns that so commonly appear in the work of outsider artists, generated by ‘non-standard’ brain functioning (or whatever the currently accepted catchphrase is), mimic the output of recursive functions, and various iteration species of the mindless algorithm. You’ll will have to wait for a more detailed post on this confluence of seemingly different paradigms – but expect one soon.</p>
<p>In the mean time attention will drawn to the work of Max Hattler, specifically his work <a href=‘1923 aka Heaven’ which was ‘inspired by the work of French outsider artist Augustin Lesage. ‘1923’ is based on Lesage’s painting ‘A Symbolic Composition of the Spiritual World’ from the same year.

In this film loop the viewer is taken on a trajectory through a seemingly infinite architecture of moving pillars, sliding steps and shifting façades, each adorned with glowing primitive shapes – circles and squares. The experience seems to be a well worked out exercise in the geometric resonance of nested complexity, the end result is a building that is a machine – a chapter of Tron occurring in Ancient Egypt. The bilateral symmetry, often also favoured by outsider artists, is employed to yield illusions of totemic forms in a way that those who have a fondness for Rorschach ink blots will appreciate.

Sync - Max Hattler
Sync – Max Hattler

Be sure to check out Max’s related video ‘1925 aka Hell’ for a darker journey into a dystopian mechanized landscape. Also not to missed is ‘Sync’ featured at Instantcinema. Sync is another exercise in periodic movement and relationships between circulating abstract geometric forms.

‘There is an underlying unchanging sync at the centre of everything. All constituent parts are locked into it as the gigantic zoetrope disc’s constant rotation creates all movement’

Michael Kukla – Cellular Vortex Fields

Untitled 18 - Michael Kukla
Untitled 18 – Michael Kukla

Michael Kukla’s monochromatic drawings on paper are built up with successive layers of ink to creating cellular fields that have the illusion of depth. Vortices of negative space imply complex nebulous forms fragile to touch, movements of bubbles across a foam surface, and flat surfaces with outbreaks of sponge-like areas. The procedural cellular approach approximates the geometry of packed soap bubbles, when applied to sculpture the memories of these bubbles appear as fossilized remnant textures.

Trajectories in the Blog Galaxy #3: Particle Decelerator, Binary Heap & Emergent Urbanism

The Genesis of Complex Geometry at Emergent Urbanism
The Genesis of Complex Geometry at Emergent Urbanism

PARTICLE DECELERATOR

Synthesizing news and information from the new frontiers of art-science, with a particular emphasis on the quantum and cosmological, is Honor Hager’s Particle Decelerator blog. Picking up on the latest findings in particles physics, radio astronomy and dark matter, to name a few, Particle Decelerator unravels philosophical, metaphysical and political connotations connected to these subjects. Not to be missed is Honor’s TED talk ‘Listening to the Sounds of Space’, a wonderfully paced, concise exposé on the history of the Universe in sound.

BINARY HEAP

Binary Heap contains a wide bandwidth of posts linking to electronic music theory, electro-acoustics, modular synthesis, visual music, and programmable music systems. It also contains links to historical documents. Aleatorical musicians, and those interested in use of random processes in art, may well find ‘An Anthology of Chance Operations’ a must read. Another aspect of Binary Heap is that it collects examples of music software, including plug-ins and add-ons for DAW based software, as well as small idiosyncratic algorithmic generators.

EMERGENT URBANISM

Emergent Urbanism is a blog that was maintained by Mathieu Helie and has been non-functional since October 2010. A comprehensive list of the larger, more detailed, posts have been archived on a page of their own and cover subjects such as complexity and self-similarity applied to city growth, the geometry of town planning vs urban sprawl and the emergent morphology of settlement.

The Musicality of The Two-Way, Magnetic-Electric Thought-Wave Universe of Walter Russell

Universal Periodic Chart (detail)- Walter Russell
Universal Periodic Chart (detail)- Walter Russell

Outsider scientific-mystic Walter Russell developed a lifelong philosophy based on the unifying principles of forces within the cosmos – what seems like a kind of pseudo-scientifically framed offshoot of non-dualism. The most interesting elements his work are the diagrams and charts illustrating his books. They document an idiosyncratic understanding of natural phenomena such as light, magnetism, thermodynamics, waves and vibration.

Esa Ruoho has collected together many illustrations from Russell’s key works in Flickr sets – images from the books The Secret of Light, The Universal One and Atomic Suicide. The ‘In the Wave’ set contains charts with painted colour spectra and elliptical prismatic shapes denoting light waves, electrical vibrations and magnetism.

A strong theme running through Russell’s schematics, especially evident in his ‘Home Study Course’ is the correspondences of geometric equivalences and orders. The charts resemble sets of musical scales, denoting frameworks of periodicity and harmony within particular natural systems. Many of the diagrams, at first glance, might easily be be misinterpreted as modern musical notation. ‘Stages of Growth in the Nine pairs of Radar Mirrors’ is a prime example. The top half insinuates a time-line while the bottom half connotes a wiring schematic for a multi-channel electro-acoustic performance!

Controlled Power Multiplication Principle as Recorded by Gravity Bar - Walter Russell
Controlled Power Multiplication Principle as Recorded by Gravity Bar – Walter Russell

The pseudo-science and religious ideas served up by Russell, and his wife Lao, at the University of Science and Philosophy paint a patchwork pattern of fuzzy utopianism, idealism and at times naivety. As Art-Brut is to Art, so characters like Russell and Lao are to traditional mainstream science and so they are essential. It might just be the case that Walter Russell’s genius, and his diagrams, can only be decoded at a later moment in time. His friend Nikola Tesla had advised him to lock away his work in a safe for 1000 years – because humankind was not yet mature enough for it.

‘The glory of becoming a transcendent being is the only reason for living’ – Lao Russell

‘Mediocrity is self-inflicted and genius is self-bestowed’ – Walter Russell

Flickr Fruits #37, Affine Swarms, Geods & Gothic Glass houses

g01i02a30 - Benjamin Dillenburger
g01i02a30 – Benjamin Dillenburge

Benjamin Dillenburger’s Structures and Digital Catenary sets collect images generated using shape grammars in Processing adapted to create crystalline wire-frames that are both architectural and biomorphic. The Structure set documents the evolution of dense symmetrical canopy’s – its not hard to imagine these structures as a proposal for a futurist glass house in a Gothic style.

Justin Livi’s justinlivi.Geode() set contains outputs from a Processing sketch that accurately resemble banded Agates – a micro-crystalline silicate with arrangements of concentric deposition rings. Some of the Geode patterns have the quality of water colour work, mimicking the way suspended inks create diffusion filaments as they disperse through water on paper.

Leonardo Solaas Affine Swarms are created by generating autonomous agents that leave trails of their movement under the effect of Affine Transformations. As the agents move from random to more constrained behaviour the outputs develop from noisy textures to rhythmically modulated geometric lattices.

Related:
Banded Agates, Sonic Hydrodynamics & the BZ Reaction

Patabotany #3: Growth Assembly

Growth Assembly - Sasha Pohflepp and Daisy Ginsberg.
Growth Assembly – Sasha Pohflepp and Daisy Ginsberg.

Sasha Pohflepp and Daisy Ginsberg’s project ‘Growth Assembly’ is comprised of a set plant-machine illustrations together which form part of larger composite horticultural mechanism.

‘After the cost of energy had made global shipping of raw materials and packaged goods unimaginable, only the rich could afford traditional, mass-produced commodities.

Synthetic biology enabled us to harness our natural environment for the production of things. Coded into the DNA of a plant, product parts grow within the supporting system of the plant’s structure. When fully developed, they are stripped like a walnut from its shell or corn from its husk, ready for assembly.’

Growth Assembly, which was illustrated by Sion Ap Tomos is a pictorial investigation in synthetic biology and DNA manipulation. The illustrations have been created in a similar style to those found in traditional illustrated pharmacopoeia and botanical codices of the last few centuries. These botanical codices, particularly in the 19th century, were produced as an aid to cultivation and hybridization of plants. Creating plant hybrids can be considered an early form of non-invasive genetic engineering. In this sense Growth Assembly continues the lineage of study in plant manipulation and botanical engineering – albeit extending it into a domain of pataphysical science-fiction speculation.

Patabotany #2: Grow your own Worlds

groWorld-randomGarden-01 - Tale of Tales
groWorld-randomGarden-01 – Tale of Tales

Foam’s groWorld initiative, begun in 2007 and still in operation, is a many headed hydra exploring vegetal syncretism with workshops, conference discussions and art exhibitions – details of which can be found here. One particular groWorld interest is in the patafusion of permaculural idioms to the world of gaming. Much has been written about the need for liberation in video games from the ubiquitous and inane shootem-up scenario.

Dave Griffiths has been documenting the development of a set of patabotanical gameworlds at his site related to the groWorld initiative. His Plant Eyes game, developed with his own open prototyping engine Fluxus, allows the player to take on the role of a plant and roam through an organic environment utilising nutrients to grow into new plant forms.

Mandrake from A Pictorial History of Ancient Pharmacy (1902) - Peters, Hermann
Mandrake from A Pictorial History of Ancient Pharmacy (1902) – Peters, Hermann

Tale of Tales, a games development studio lab specialising in poetic gaming paradigms, have also contributed some patabotanical game prototypes. There are no ruined texture-mapped citadels pock-marked from the ricochets of bullets to found in this lush blue-tinged multi-player jungle.

Woman as a plant – plant as a man. Combining a bifurcating root formation that resembles the human form and containing a psychedelic concoction of tropane alkaloids, the Mandrake (‘Djinn’s eggs’ in Arabic) is an emblem of vegetable-human synthesis. Mandrake ‘generates alpha brain-wave activity, similar to that found in REM sleep, generating hypnotic landscapes of the internal gameworld.

Related:
Aljazar – Live coded robot music (Also by Dave Griffiths)

Patabotany #1: [At the Libarynth] The Forest is a College, Each Tree a University.

Pataplant Guild Sketch - Foam
Pataplant Guild Sketch – Foam

Adapting the absurdist metaphysical conjectures of Pataphysics (Alfred Jarry’s Science of imaginary solutions) to Botany creates a fantastic ecology of verdant pataphors. Metaflora, Phycological futurology and hypnogogic phyllotaxis perhaps? Libarynth invents and documents this new branch of speculative science and its related offshoots by ‘patafying’ the study of plants.

Triffids take note! Maja Kuzmanovic and Nik Gaffney’s Cursory Speculations on Human Plant Interaction ‘explores the nature of surfaces and processes required to facilitate reciprocal interaction between humans and plants’. Examined in the paper: the continued evolution of human-plant symbiotics – in their somatic and syntactic protocols. This includes shamanic enthogenic communication and Thalient strategies.

Visualists craving some pictorial cues will enjoy Foam’s Flickr stream of Patabotanical illustrations. Here you’ll find a collection of arbocultural surrealism – machine seeds and plant fusions. The Magnum Opus of this set is the extravagantly complex Pataforest, a kind of floating forest biohaven, apparently in complete self-contained harmony – a part-game design-plan for a topsoil Eden minutiae.

If patabotanical art has a precursor, maybe we need look no further than our friend Paul Klee – consider for example Botanical Theatre or Apparatus for the Magnetic Treatment of Plants. We should also not forget the arborescent algebraic notation of The Voynich Manuscript.

Note: ‘The Forest is a College, Each Tree a University’ is a line from the lyrics of Coil’s ‘Queens of the Circulating Library’

Related:
http://fo.am/

Trajectories in the Blog Galaxy #2: Cryptoforestry, Bio-Inspired Computation & Rendering the 20th Century

The Square - Stanley Tigerman and G.L. Crabtree
The Square – Stanley Tigerman and G.L. Crabtree

RNDRD

RNDRD, ‘Rendering the 20th Century’, contains a compilation of scans taken from out-of-print architectural journals, otherwise impossible to get hold of, and defining key movements in the evolution of architectural practice. Rather than concentrate on finished projects, the specialisation here is in drawings, collages, and dioramas. The most spectacular images are those of the futuristic and experimental utopianism of the 60s and 70s.

‘RNDRD loves awkward models, the sketchiness of early computer graphics and even building types and strategies, now hackneyed, that once appeared as innovative solutions. Buildings are expensive, but paper is cheap. The most interesting project may not be the one that was built. RNDRD wants to give these unseen works and forgotten trends a presence on the internet’

RNDRD is complied by Josh Conrad and Lauren Hamer

CRYPTOFOREST

Wilfried Hou Je Bek has been entertaining us with a diverse landscape of wild-style essays for as long as blogs have existed. Socialfiction fans will have learned of bacteriopoetics, gargoyle automatons, algorithmic psychogeography and the philosophy of crystalpunk to name a few. Last year Socialfiction evaporated into the digital aether (Although you can still find some of it archived here). Good news however appearance of his more recent project(ion) and its accompanying blog – Cryptoforest. Cryptoforestry extends the vectors of psychogeography into the realms of of feral, in-limbo, incognito, precognitive and unappreciated forests in the urban environment.

CHEMOTON

Chemoton is Vitorino Ramos research notebook containing thoughts about ‘artificial life, bio-inspired computation, complex sciences, their applications and technologies. This is one corner of browser-space where thoughts on the work of John Cage and Paul Klee collide with short essays on the social intelligence of bacteria and fluid dynamics of ant colonies.

Tom Beddard – Geometric Organica

Surface Detail - Tom Beddard
Surface Detail – Tom Beddard

Tom Beddard [Sublue] has been featured on these pages before – in a post on Structure Synth, in a Selected Tweets, and at least two Flicker Fruits collections: #17 and #34. It’s time to devote a complete post to his work concentrating on recent projects.

Tom develops his own ‘home-brew’ raytracing shader software to generate highly complex fractal topologies, tessellated surfaces, and three-dimensional objects. Surface Detail is a good example of the capabilities of his software. Combined with a monochromatic palette it generates fractal aesthetics distinct from any you’ve seen before. A rotating planetoid structure, mutates through a steadily transitioning surface of subdivisioned self-similar cells. The effect is morphogenetic, biological and botanical – compare his work to this SEM picture of Gephyrocapsa oceanica for example. Flickr stills of Surface Detail can be found here. Geometric Organica, a precursor to Surface Detail, similarly deals with organic networks of fractal forms, which appear as machine-crafted seeds and fruits.

The most recent update to this sequence of works is the realisation of a WebGL application that can run in any current browser supporting Mozilla’s powerful WebGL library (Google Chrome & Firefox 4 Beta). The intense Sci-fi like scenographs generated by Fractal Lab hint at the kinds of landscapes perhaps envisioned by Terrence Mckenna and John C Lilly while musing on solid state intelligence and ultra complex machine planet ecologies.

Related:
aDiatomea – Sonically Superformed Micro-organisms
Year of the Radiolarian