Archives for the Month of December, 2007

Flickr Fruits 12 – Black and White is the new Black.

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Noisey 68 – Desaxismundi

Using VVVV, Desaxismundi transforms noise values into op-art waveform landscapes. Sometime these ribbon-like filaments appear contextualized in grids as if to imply readings on an oscilloscope.

Using Indian & Chinese ink on Moleskin, Lemez covers his pages with graphic decorative swirls, as if trying to find the perfect space-filling swirl algorithm.

Using ‘partially directed non-optimizing fitting strategy’ in Processing, Dave Bollinger’s Density set has an aesthetic that evokes work from the Op-Art movement, where individual elements, as he puts it, ‘fall somewhere in the nether regions between random placement, deterministic placement and optimal packing placement.

LennyJpg’s Soundtovertex set contains shapes that look like calligraphic glyphs – ribbon shapes spell out transcoded interpretations of an audio stream, they also bear an uncanny resemblance to GPS drawings.

In the land of the Polytopes – Boole, Coxeter, Escher, Go….

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Jenn – Fritz Obermeyer

Fritz Obermeyer’s Jenn is a nicely crafted java application that allows a playful examination of structures in non-Euclidian space, more specifically Coxeter polytopes in stereographic projection. These complex geometric structures are the 4-dimensional Sisters to the polyhedra and have, what seems like, recursive interiors and packing formations that resemble bubbles in foam.

The applet allows you to fly through these structures and orient the camera view according to your whims; other controls include toggles for the kind of rendering display settings. Perhaps I shouldn’t report it, but there are also some nice rendering glitches on some of the selected models on certain views.

The word ‘polytope’ was introduced by Alicia Boole Stott, the daughter of logician George Boole. So the story goes, she had a remarkable understanding of 4- dimensional geometry (X,Y,X,Time) from an early age. By the age of 18 she worked out by herself the six regular polytopes and built cardboard models of their sections. Later on she would meet and work with Harold Coxeter whose algorithms were employed in Jenn.

You might experience a feeling of non-Euclidean déjà vous while roaming around Jenns polytope space, the experience of space is a lot like being in one of Escher’s drawings. And neatly enough, ‘Coxeter met M. C. Escher in 1954 at a mathematics conference in Amsterdam. Escher had heard about Coxeter’s work on shapes in
Multidimensional space and sought him out. After the conference, Coxeter sent Escher a copy of his paper ‘Crystal Symmetry and Its Generalizations’ which was illustrated with complex geometric figures, including a circle containing a pattern of objects that grew smaller and smaller as they neared the edge.’

Inspired, Escher used this figure as a source for his series of ‘Circle Limit’ etchings. Coxeter and Escher remained friends until the artist’s death in 1972. It also worth noting that Coxeter was in good contact with another Dataisnature fave, Bucky Fuller, Fuller dedicated his book, Synergetics to geometrician.

After you’ve finished with Jenn, why not try your skill at Jenngo, a version of every combinatorialist’s favorite board game, Go, where the board is embedded in projective 3d-space! (download it on the same page). Afterwoods, treat yourself to a collection of Psycholudological snacks at Socialfiction, specifically those posts marked with the tag ‘Go’ and find out what its ALL about.

Connecting onward flights:
Exotic Geometries: Paper Tessellations and Spidrons.
Spacelike tessellations of tetrahedrons
Exotic mathematical surfaces.

Nervous System

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Reaction Cups – Nervous System

In the past year we’ve seen fashion prints hit the catwalks with generative designs adorning them, newsfeed knitwear, and an ever increasing growth of crocheted coral forms incorporating nature’s penchant for the hyperbolic plane. Time then to turn to jewelry, and considering the recent interest in Rapid Prototyping, it was only a matter of time. Applying algorithms that describe nature such as DFL (Diffusion Limited Aggregation), Nervous System allows users to design personalized artifacts, resembling dendrite structures using an online applet.

Related:
Human Robots & Space-Filling Emotions ( Art made with DFL)
Generator.X 2.0 Beyond The Screen, Call
Exotic mathematical surfaces (Rapid Prototyping)

Entheogenic Software – Henri Michaux

Michaux Mescaline drawings
Mescaline Drawings – Henri Michaux

Joseph Nechval hits the nail firmly on the head in describing Henri Michaux’s Mescaline drawings as a space where ‘we see the mind/hand become cyborg, taking on the systematic (but out-of-control vibrational qualities) of the robo-seismograph.’

Entheogens are the software, a program to be run in the brain hardware, sending encoded information to its peripherals, layering discreet but coded information. Michaux’s Mescaline drawings offer the sort of topologies often discovered under a microscope, or seen in a Jitter patch (I’m thinking Xx+xy’s visuals to Murcof’s music last Sunday at the Corsica Studios, London). Crawling non organic crystal matter coagulates into landscapes as the drug software distributes points and data in XYZ space, then connects the points through intelligent networks revealing intuitively the chemistry of the brain and the thought process itself.

Michaux’s drawings, done in the 50’s, offer maps of vastly complex energy fields, the kind of which he described as ‘thousands and thousands of effulgent microscopic points, dazzling diamonds, flashes of microbes’ This is algorithmic psychedelia at full power and the fine optical food for lovers of pattern-recognition systems.

U-Sun – Temporal Axis

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GLcore – Usun

U-Sun’s works combine the malfunction aesthetic to triangulation computations and topological meshes to produce digital pixel paintings in the spirit of action painting. The successive layering of lines on the surface of each wire frame eventually conspires to disintegrate the original form leaving a history of decompositions and disconnections. For a good overview of her work check out the GLcore Flickr set, a group of glitch forms utilizing her GLcore Engine built with Max/Msp.

U-sun has recently set up a Topology Flickr pool, and it needs your contributions now.