Archives for the Month of February, 2009

Journey Drawings – Tim Knowles

Tim Knowles
Monaco Grand Prix Track Drawing Tim Knowles

SerialConsign recently made an nice post on a group of process based art works by Tim Knowles where trajectories of car journeys were recorded using bespoke drawing mechanisms. A home-made device records every nuance of the cars movement as it is steered, accelerated and decelerated. The vectors of the lines are in opposition to the movement of the car instigating a pseudo harmonographic principle to chaotic extremes.

Elsewhere Tim’s quirky postal drawings are tracings of an object travelling through the postal system’s time-space. In this case its safe to say that the travelling is certainly more important than the arriving, perhaps the travelling is the arriving.

Flickr Fruits #23

Flickr Fruits #23
Minerals 12 – Dottore

9000’s Plan 9.001 set contains curious semiotic remixes, hybrids and diagrammatic transformations of popular signs, symbols, and identities. The juxtaposition of unconnected, but familiar glyphs on faded backgrounds creates poetic, and at times amusing concurrences.

Vladimir Bulatov’s small mathematical metal sculptures vary from polyhedral knots to symmetrical crystalline forms, all of them intricately organic and finely finished. Mathematical models are transferred a metal printing machine, which assembles the actual sculptures from thin (0.002 inch) layers of stainless steel powder.

Digitalslaves collect a futuristic set of abstract and broken curves generated in VVVV. These arcs appear to be centrifugally held together by a kind of plasma or electronic spark.

More VVVV work comes in the form of Dottore’s generated Minerals, multitudes of semi-transparent triangle extrusions collectively align in undulating formations.

Event Horizons

events march 09
The Grammar Complete – Paul Brown

The CAS informs us of a couple of interesting upcoming events dealing with the history of computer art.

The first is the informal launch of a new book on the history of early British computer art at the next CAS meeting in London. ‘White Heat Cold Logic – British Computer Art 1960-1980’ is published by MIT Press. Judging by the table of contents and calibre of writers involved this looks like an invaluable contribution to the dissemination of a body of work that is often overlooked. On the same night there will also be a talk given by Francesca Franco on the first computer art show at the Venice Biennale in 1970. The event takes place on the 4th March, more details can be found here.

Just a couple of days later on the 6th March, but this time across the water in NYC, the Technocultures: The History of Digital Art discussion takes place. This event facilitates a panel conversation featuring computer animation pioneers Ken Knowlton and Lillian Schwartz, mathematical sculptor Kenneth Snelson (famed for his Tensegrity sculptures) and Margot Lovejoy, artist and author of Digital Currents: Art in the Electronic Age. Full details can be found here.

Jerome St Claire – Circle Packing Ishihara Spills

Jerome St Claires
Drawing #012 – Jerome St Claires

Jerome St Claires’s carefully hand drawn agglomerations of various sized circles immediately remind Dataisnature of the famous Ishihara colour blind tests, where numbers were concealed (at least to those disposed to Protanopia or Deuteranopia) in a densely packed group of coloured dots. Of course, there are no numbers in these monochromatic drawings to find, but the eye brain partnership attends to duties of pattern recognition regardless. In these liquid streams, reminiscent of bubbles in spilled ink, we find figures, plant shapes and biological life forms. The later chimeras arise from ribbons of dots enforced by the organic cellular arrangents to great effect in almost computational precision. For the full effect be sure to view the drawings at the largest size.

The White Sinter Terraces of Roto-Màhànà & the Wai-o-Tapu Champagne Pool

sinter
Waiotapu Thermal Wonderland – Jessica Rosenkrantz

Nervous System has recently posted some excellent pictures of the Sinter Terraces of Roto-Màhànà and the Wai-o-Tapu Champagne pool in the Northern Island of New Zealand. These great process-based natural earthworks are caused by silica deposits contained in water that comes from a geyser 100ft above the Roto-Màhànà lake and other hot springs. The Sinter deposits form a wide variety of mini-terrains, from spicules (spike-like growths) to terraces. The depositions are further coloured by the presence of microorganisms. Pink and Orange terraces are the result of a population of thermophilic bacterium, tiny emergent artistic co-collaborators with the silicates in water. At times the formations seem to have frozen the undulations of water into the rock itself, elsewhere crystalline anemones appear huddle on mass at the waters edge.

For large scale terracing see Procedural land art, agricultural algorithms & walk recipes reversed.

Year of the Radiolarian

radiolaria2009
Radiolaria Study – Robert Hodgin

Along with the Biomorphs and Cellular Automata you can find Radiolarians appearing heavily on the Dataisnature coat of arms, these microscopic creatures who’s skeletons emit elegant geometric forms take the place of lions and unicorns.

The real life genetic algorithms behind the formation of these spectacular microscopia lead to self-organising micro-architectures, tiny Buckyballs tessellated via subdivsioning processes. Christine Brody has an interesting page explaining the functional benefits arising from the intricate forms of the radiolaria with some excellent illustrations. The article also proposes theories on how the recursive polyhedral forms arise through processed accretions of silicates in different ways.

The greatest survey of these miniatures, of course, came from Ernst Haeckle, Dataisnature has linked to his illustrations slightly less than a hundred times before – it will do no harm to point you in that direction again. Here’s a page of Acantharia, specimens studied during the famous voyage of HMS Challenger from 1873-1876.

radiolaria2009
KunstForm4 – Michael Hansmeyer

It no surprise that artists have been inspired by these organisms, George Hart has a page on ‘Reticulated Geodesic Constructions’ and describes an algorithm for producing an ‘Artificial Radiolarian Reticulum’. Radiolaria.org collates the work of a group of artists who have hand made sculptures inspired by these Kunstformen der Natur.

Recently Robert Hodgin has rendered some very elegant visualisations in Processing by repurposing some previous experiments, check out his Radiolaria Studies here. Michael Hansmeyer, who’s work was mentioned recently at D==N, also references Heackle’s illustrations in his Subdivision Set 4 – where symmetrical organisms have a paper-fine texture like silicate itself. For more morphological wonder head over to the Natural Probes Flickr collection of the Digital Design Studio, Jonas Coersmeier.