Archives for the Month of July, 2013

Prehistoric Messages of the Widmanstätten Cursive

Widmanstätten Pattern - Seymchan Meteor FragmentWidmanstätten Pattern – Seymchan Meteor Fragment

Widmanstätten Patterns, found in Octahedrite Iron meteorites appear in isometric configurations – their cursive lattice-work is reminiscent of the calligraphic paintings of both Mark Tobey and Brion Gysin. It was Austrian printer-scientist Alois von Beckh Widmanstätten who noted their patterns after removing rust from the Hraschina meteorite in 1808. This cryptic wildstyle of extraterrestrial origin was actually discovered 4 years earlier by an English Geologist G.Thomson, who treated the Krasnojarsk meteorite with nitric acid, similarly in order to clean it from rust. His claim to its discovery was obscured by, and lost in the ruins of the Napoleonic war.

Hraschina_HaidingerDrawing by M. W. Haidinger drawing depicts the fall of the Hraschina meteorite based on eyewitness accounts

In his book The Writing of Stones, Roger Caillois prompts us to read the inclusions and patterns of gemstones and minerals as if they were a secret cypher or as an aid to scrying. He asks us to delve into their unconscious symbolism in the same way Hermann Rorschach hoped to trigger psychological insinuations aided by the well-known symmetrical inkblots.

widmanstattenWidmanstätten Pattern

According to Marina Warner in her excellent essay, The Writing of Stones, material mystics such as Caillois ‘do not search for self-knowledge, nor for foreknowledge of their destiny or the sirens’ secret; but they emphatically investigate hidden meanings and scan the deepest horizons of time into infinity where the world turns into an inexhaustible book written in hieroglyphs’

What kind of messages might the Widmanstätten cursive encode? If Caillois was looking for the infinities of time contained in such hieroglyphs he would have come close to finding them here. Channelled through the language of exogeology we find that these scripts tell a very old story – as old as our solar system itself. The Widmanstätten figures of the Gibeon Meteor, which were formed in near zero-gravity conditions, are up to 4 billions years old. Here is a story of crystal patterns generated by an intergrowth of nickel-rich taenite and nickel-deprived kamacite during an extremely slow cooling process of one degree in every one thousand years. This means that were formed inside the dying core of a protoplanet.

gibeonSphereWidmanstätten Pattern at 40µm, 80µm, 400µm & 400µm [clockwise from top left]

The lithic meditations of the tribes of the Kalahari Desert, where the Gibeon Meteor impacted upon Earth in prehistoric times, may well have resulted in interpretations of a different kind. English Captain and Explorer Sir James E. Alexander, who was the first Westerner to discover the Gibeon, noted that these tribes used pieces of meteor to make tools and weapons. Most likely they may have also worshiped fragments of these fallen stones, as has been noted in many instances, making the Widmanstätten cursive the oldest sacred text in Solar System.

widmanstattenWidmanstätten Pattern

gibeonSphereWidmanstätten Pattern – Gibeon Sphere

Further Reading:

The Stone As A Witness Of Time in which Rohit Gupta explores the concentric geometry of Banded Agates as ‘encoding imprints of eclipses, occultations and syzygys’ and as the ‘etched memory of every single diurnal rotation of the planet on its solitary axis’. Furthermore his entire blog Compasswallah provides excellent reading.

The Writings of Stones – Images, annotations and quotes from Roger Caillois’s out-of-print book at 50watts.

The Worship of Meteorites – Hubert A. Newton

Related at Dataisnature:

The Lost Kingdoms and Scripts of the Lichens
Hypogean Wildstyle: Dominik Strzelec’s Byzantine Geology
Banded Agates, Sonic Hydrodynamics & the BZ Reaction
The Wave – Earth Waveform Oscillations

Stanley Tigerman & G. T. Crabtree – The Formal Generators of Structure

The Formal Generators of Structure - Stanley Tigerman & G. T. CrabtreeThe Formal Generators of Structure – Stanley Tigerman & G. T. Crabtree

Architect Stanley Tigerman’s ‘The Formal Generators of Structure’ (Architecture & Urbanism Journal, 1975) explored the combinatorial use of rectilinear shapes to generate volumetric, optical and architectonic compositions. Spatial configurations of the square and cruciform are extruded to create axonometric projections reminiscent of the ‘ideal’ geometricism of the De Stijl school and the works of Op-artists such as Albers and Vasarely who toyed with the square to infinity through structural multiplicity and chromatic modulation. Tigermans paper published alongside his series of drawings (with G. T. Crabtree) explores many other examples of squared axonometry in art and architecture noting that:

‘Two rationalizations of the Western World have focused on the unchanging qualities of the right angle. One has been synthesized in art as a formal universality in the form of the square. The other has been synthesized in religion as a spiritual universality in the form of the cross’

The Formal Generators of Structure - Stanley Tigerman & G. T. Crabtree

The Formal Generators of Structure - Stanley Tigerman & G. T. Crabtree

The Formal Generators of Structure - Stanley Tigerman & G. T. Crabtree

The Formal Generators of Structure - Stanley Tigerman & G. T. Crabtree

The Formal Generators of Structure - Stanley Tigerman & G. T. Crabtree

The Formal Generators of Structure - Stanley Tigerman & G. T. Crabtree

The Formal Generators of Structure - Stanley Tigerman & G. T. Crabtree

The Formal Generators of Structure - Stanley Tigerman & G. T. Crabtree

The Formal Generators of Structure - Stanley Tigerman & G. T. Crabtree

The Formal Generators of Structure - Stanley Tigerman & G. T. CrabtreeThe Formal Generators of Structure – Stanley Tigerman & G. T. Crabtree

While pinpointing fundamental expressions of the square, historically, such as the Golden Rectangle and Le Modulor, Tigerman also looks forwards towards future computational strategies for composition.

‘As the world of art, as well as that of science comes to grips with ‘Systems Analysis’ and ‘The Field Theory’, it is necessary to formally analyze certain two dimensional, man-made diagrams to ascertain their fundamental characteristics to better under-stand the role they will play in the forthcoming computerized world of networks and lattices’

Gravity is the Insidious Enemy of the Animate

Halo3 Screenshot - ThosHalo3 Screenshot – Thos

In 2007, gamer forum user Thos posted stills from a game of Halo 3 generated by a corrupt X-box. The sense of space and perspective is reconfigured through erroneous z-indexing and extreme texture scaling. Familiar buildings and vehicles are deconstructed to cubist extremities so that the rules of the game take on a more exploratory mode of interaction [also see previous post].

Halo3 Screenshot - ThorHalo3 Screenshot – Thos

drawing_woodsDrawing – Lebbeus Woods

These auto-destructive renderings of anomalous landscapes might by compared to the celebrated drawings of Lebbeus Woods. Woods’s broken and shattered façades, albeit elegantly composed, mock the Modernist ideal of an architectural utopia. His roboid skyscrapers half-eaten by parasitic substructures are viruses and program execution errors in the world of ‘established’ architecture.

Halo3 Screenshot - ThorHalo3 Screenshot – Thos

Sarajevo_Scar_woodsSarajevo Scar – Lebbeus Woods

Halo3 Screenshot - ThorHalo3 Screenshot – Thos

aero_livinglab_woodsAero Livinglab [detail] – Lebbeus Woods

The title of this post is a quote by Lebbeus Woods.

Noctuelles – No Enemies, No Puzzles, No Obstacles

Tower - NoctuellesTower – Orihaus

‘Can we create a form of digital entertainment that explicitly rejects the structure of games? What is [the role of] an interactive work of art that does not rely on competition, goals, rewards, winning or losing?’ asks Michaël Samyn in the Notgames ‘Not a manifesto’.

Michaël’s call to action explores the possibility of the game-world experience as an artform, and as a platform for a creative [re]configuration of virtual space facilitating an exploratory experience of immediacy once the traditional ‘role’ is eradicated.

Tower - NoctuellesTower – Orihaus

Tower - NoctuellesTower – Orihaus

Structure Synth Test - Orihaus Structure Synth Test – Orihaus

Structure Synth Test - Noctuelles Structure Synth Test – Orihaus

Orihaus has create a series of ‘first person exploration’ games where there are ‘no enemies, no puzzles, no obstacles’ containing procedurally generated landscapes layered with constructivist megastructures. These environments provide the disembodied psycho-geographer with a possibility to inhabit purely abstract geometric topologies. Virtual derives can be acted out in collaboration with spatial connotations generated by memory and ‘real’ world associations.

Aeon - Noctuelles Aeon – Orihaus

Aeon - Noctuelles Aeon – Orihaus

Aeon - Noctuelles Aeon – Orihaus

Aeon - Noctuelles Aeon – Orihaus

Aeon - Noctuelles Aeon – Orihaus

Aeon - Noctuelles Aeon – Orihaus

Atelier - Noctuelles Atelier – Orihaus

Atelier - Noctuelles Atelier – Orihaus

Atelier - Noctuelles Atelier – Orihaus

It would do no harm to recall Debord’s call to action [from his Theory of the Derive]:

‘In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their usual motives for movement and action and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there. The element of chance is less determinant than one might think: from the dérive point of view cities have a psychogeographical relief, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes which strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones’

Structure Synth Test - Noctuelles Structure Synth Test – Orihaus

Structure Synth Test - Noctuelles Structure Synth Test – Orihaus

Structure Synth Test - Noctuelles Structure Synth Test – Orihaus

Lumiere, Orihaus’s most recent game used Structure Synth to generate all architectural forms and constructions within the environment [source here]. The grey sketches generated from its design grammar approach provide a strong counterpoint to the final game environments which use strong emotive glow, lighting and depth-of-field Shader effects.

Related Posts:

Mikael Hvidtfeldt Christensen – Structure Synth
Patabotany #2: Grow your own Worlds
The Endless Forest – Tale of Tales
Tohu777 – Structure Synth Architectonics