Archives for the Month of August, 2010

Inside Insides – Unlocking encoded spatio-temporal morphologies

Inside Insides - Unlocking encoded spatio-temporal morphologies
Magnetic Resonance Imaging of fruits and vegetables

InsideInsides offers a collection of animations made from sequences of Magnetic Resonance Imaging of fruits and vegetables. Taking a slice at a time in topological order, and then animating the slices in sequence generates intriguing results. The vegetal forms are translated into quasi-morphological figures and biological entities. These classic archetypes, encoded spatio-temporally into the layers of the foods, act as natural visualisations of morphological development and growth.

Sections of a cucumber appear as microscopic bacterial entities with short-lifespans – fading in and out of existence, using a filtering mechanism, as if it were processing food.

The symmetry breaking movements of the watermelon animation, on the other hand, yield the kinds of geometric transformations we might find in an analogue video feedback experiment.

The London Psychgeophysics Summit

Psychogeophysical scrying Plot - Martin Howse
Psychogeophysical Scrying Plot – Martin Howse

The London Psychogeophysics Summit has been and gone – the dust has settled. If this dust were measurable the Psychogeophysicists would surely have recorded and annotated its behaviour with a DIY contraption of their own making. Titled ‘Sites of Execution and Memory’ the week long summit consisted of daily workshops to create experimental devices for the forensic study of geophysical phenomena surrounding noted past execution sites and related locales.

Psychogeophysics enhances the classic notion of the Dérive with earth science measurements, sonology and geophysical archaeology. Add to this a geohistorical context and a species of atemporal psychogeography comes in to being. Taking the science of imaginary solutions into the physical domain, and making verifiable readings of the environment in relation to these conjectures, adds a welcome Pataphysical ingredient into the mix.

Psychogeophysics.org documented the week’s proceedings in detail:

Socialfiction facillitated one of his algorithmic dot walks in Greenwich Park, which utilised the minimalist Brainfuck programming language as a generative navigation system. Using ‘The Physics of the Outdoors’ by Marcel Minnaert as a starting point urban adventurer Petr Kazil exposed an array of deep observation techniques to enhance any kind urban interfacing. Other activities included geographical emotion mapping, Psychogeophysical scrying, remote viewing sessions, Thoughtography [Projected Thermography ] and the construction of a Persinger Helmet. The latter was put to use at the Crossbones Cemetery in Southwark, an unconsecrated graveyard dating back to the middle ages.

Flickr documentation of the summit can be found here

Flickr Fruits #35 [Mapping & Topography]

Paris Mapcut - Studio Kmo
Paris Mapcut – Studio Kmo

Eric Fischer’s Geotaggers’ World Atlas set contains a serious of maps derived from photographers timestamps and geotags found on Flickr. The data has been used to calculate the speed at which the photographers were travelling and plotted on OpenStreetMap. In all there are 50 cities covered, each with density paths indicating the most navigated and photographed areas. Can the Geotaggers’ World Atlas be interpreted as map of tourism and sightseeing? The Locals and Tourist set goes some way to answering this question.

Studio Kmo has a group of sets dealing with cut-out and drawn maps, predominantly cities, which exude a staggering amount of graphic detail. The cites of New York, Paris and Singapore are covered in stencilled form, among others. There are also sets documenting the development of the paper cut pieces themselves.

The Linear Landscapes set by Leonardo Solaas contains a series of algorithmic topologies generated by sampling images, and transforming their colours into striated configurations of lines. We are reminded of landscape contours as viewed from a distance as well as geomorphological features at closer inspection.

Lauren Seiden – Gardens of Noise

Looped - Lauren Seiden
Looped – Lauren Seiden

Lauren Seiden uses found images obtained from the web, which she manipulates, to use as a base to map out complex gestural compositions that allude to natural forms, intricate webs, venation patterns and other botanical conglomerations. Her meticulously precise technique allows for the creation of patterns systems that bare notable similarity to those created using computational techniques such as pseudo-random noise generation (Perlin Roots and Perlin Sketch, by Stinging Eyes on Flickr, are good examples of this comparison)

Many of the drawings contain overlayed translucent cellular colonies inter-connected by tendrils which resemble the networks generated by surface colonising symbionts such as the Lichens. In others works, such as Looped, there is a strong insinuation of movement – as if small filaments or hairs are responding to tiny turbulent air currents. In many of the drawings we are left guessing as to to the nature of the original blueprint images used, and possible transmutation from the mundane to the miraculous.