Archives for the Month of January, 2010

Flickr Fruits #32 | Cyborgs, Folded Fractals & Magnetic Architectures

Flickr Fruits  32
The Un-making of a Cyborg (detail) – Scloopy

Scloopy’s ‘The un-making of a Cyborg’ contains a set of compositions of wirey extrusions and explosions. As the title suggests the structures pertain to the deconstruction of a some kind of robotic/cybernetic entity. A Processing script was used to generate the shapes which were then imported into Cinema4d for final rendering.

Sanch has recently documented his Foldable Fractal piece, originaly created during the Generator.x 2.0: Beyond The Screen workshop held by Marius Watz, in Berlin in 2007. Sanch utilised an L-System algorithm in VVVV to generate cutting paths, the material was then half-cut using lasers enabling it to be folded in a succession of recursive pentagonal shapes.

Flight 404 has uploaded some new images to his Magnetic Architecture set. Particularly recommended are the photographs of the monochromatic prints that were shown the McLeod Residence gallery in Seattle. Dense, and highly detailed, multi-form particle structures were generated in Processing using Perlin Noise and controlled by gravitational forces.

Erwin Keustermans – Patterns by Partition

Erwin Keustermans
Patterns by Partition – Erwin Keustermans

Erwin Keustermans has created a number of hand drawings using the human equivalent of a sub-divisioning algorithm (as well as a number of other process based systems). The ‘Patterns by Partition’ collection derive two dimensional circular networks from this simple repetitive process of gesture constraint. The circular lattices in the set of works made for the Museum Dr. Guislain occasionally allude to plant forms. 6*6*6*6*6 compares well to the genus of Taraxacum, for example. Elsewhere in this set, the symmetrical aligned shapes begin to become populated by biomorphic shapes, botanical ephemera, and personages. 1001 pays homage to the well known ‘outsider’ artist Adolf Wölfli, incorporating his style of drawing into the compositions.

Erwin’s Cubes set contain motifs with notable similarity to Rangoli – a form of sand/flour painting decoration found in the doorways of homes in India. Rangoli patterns are constructed by connecting a matrix of dots in a procedural way to create symmetrical ornamentation. Similarly Erwin intersperses the sub-divided shape patterns with dots, in the case of 8x8x8 there is also the illusion of a flattened hyperbolic sphere. These pieces further confronts us with the possibility of a combinatorial set of board games, with various species of, as yet, unfathomable Draughts and/or Go board alternatives. The set of cube drawings are mounted together to form the impressive geometric sculpture – The Cabinet of Cubic Partitions.

Reed Danziger – Landscapes of Systems & Multiplicities

Reed Danziger
A Secret Distant Measurement (detail) & Sequence III (detail) – Reed Danziger

Reed Danziger’s paintings are filled with process based gestures, crystalline facets, geometric repetitions, biomorphic multiplicities and network-like structures. Natural colours allude to natural processes, the weathering of rock into generative forms, the splatters of paint into definable patterns. A tensile force system seems to exists between groups of elements, its as if the collective ecosystem was about to reconfigure into a new landscape at the next instant. Occasionally amid the particles, shards, splatters and facets, molecular structures evolve and mathematical grids appear. These are little hints at the underlying connection between the graphical representation of systems, the classification of processes and the actual forms of the things being represented themselves.

Related:
Julie Mehretu – Psychogeographic paintings

Invisible Commitment – Oli Laurelle

Invisible Commitment - Oli Laurelle
Invisible Commitment – Oli Laurelle

Invisible Commitment is a print project by Oli Laurelle that sets about visualising SVN logs (as well as Pure Data and SuperCollider source code) by representing various attributes and parameters with tree-like and branching structures. SVN, also known as Subversion, is a version-control system allowing developers to maintain current and historical versions of files – typically development source code.

Oli uses recursive algorithms to parse his data into Processing. The typical branching structures are a common schematic arrived at from such divide and conquer methodologies where problems are solved by solving smaller and smaller instances.

The SVN folder structures generate the main branches of the tree, their thickness indicates the frequencies according to occurrences of individual developers accessing files. Branch length further denotes the number of sub-folders contained within each folder. Fruits at the end of each branch represent the type of file contained by accessing specific file type extensions.

The style of the final renders have something of the spatial qualities associated with Chinese scroll paintings, this aspect being accentuated by seal-like red blocks positioned at the bottom of each composition. These seals contain information regarding who was involved in the project – including the names of the developers and duration of time they were involved in each project.

This project uses open-source visualization software (Processing) to visualize the working of an open source application (SVN) and was presented at a festival of open-source and free software, the Make Art Festival, held in France in December 2009.