Monthly Archives: November 2006

Homage to Alexander Calder

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Homage to Alexander Calder

Homage to Alexander Calder (1999)

To an engineer, good enough means perfect. With an artist, there’s no such thing as perfect.
—Alexander Calder

From the National Gallery of Art:

Alexander Calder revolutionized the art of sculpture by making movement one of its main components. Yet his invention of the “mobile” — a word coined in 1931 by artist Marcel Duchamp to designate Calder’s moving sculpture — was only one of Calder’s achievements. In his early wire figures and in his “stabiles,” static sculptures in sheet metal, Calder created innovative works by exploring the aesthetic possibilities of untraditional materials. As a major contribution to the development of abstract art, Calder’s stabiles and mobiles challenged the prevailing notion of sculpture as a composition of masses and volumes by proposing a new definition based on the ideas of open space and transparency. With the giant stabiles of the latter part of his career, Calder launched a new type of public sculpture — one which proved so successful that many of these works have become landmarks in cities around the globe.

And from the Joslyn Art Museum:

Alexander Calder, America’s first abstract artist of international renown, is forever associated with his invention of the mobile. Born into a Philadelphia family of sculptors, he studied first as a mechanical engineer and then as a painter in the style of the Ashcan School. In 1926, Calder left for Paris, then Europe’s cultural capital. There he attracted the attention of the avant-garde with his amusing performances with a partly-mechanized miniature circus of wire and cloth figures. By 1930 he had developed freely moving sculptures of arcs and spheres. Calder’s mobiles were squarely within the spirit of the times, from their engagement with machine technology to their use of abstraction as a universal language of creative truth. Linked to Dada and Surrealism by playfulness and chance arrangement, his sculpture responded to Constructivism by energizing art’s elements in the viewer’s space.

Calder, fascinated by the mechanical possibilities of his materials, successfully merged engineering and art. His innovative, abstract work is industrial-tinged and aggressively modern. He saw sculpture as dynamic — as filled with the motion of life as electrons gyrating around a nucleus.

Homage to Niels Bohr

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Homage to Niels Bohr

Homage to Niels Bohr (2004)

From Nobelprize.org:

In the autumn of 1911 [Bohr] made a stay at Cambridge, where he profited by following the experimental work going on in the Cavendish Laboratory under Sir J.J. Thomson’s guidance, at the same time as he pursued own theoretical studies. In the spring of 1912 he was at work in Professor Rutherford’s laboratory in Manchester, where just in those years such an intensive scientific life and activity prevailed as a consequence of that investigator’s fundamental inquiries into the radioactive phenomena. Having there carried out a theoretical piece of work on the absorption of alpha rays which was published in the Philosophical Magazine, 1913, he passed on to a study of the structure of atoms on the basis of Rutherford’s discovery of the atomic nucleus. By introducing conceptions borrowed from the Quantum Theory as established by Planck, which had gradually come to occupy a prominent position in the science of theoretical physics, he succeeded in working out and presenting a picture of atomic structure that, with later improvements (mainly as a result of Heisenberg’s ideas in 1925), still fitly serves as an elucidation of the physical and chemical properties of the elements.

[…]

Bohr also contributed to the clarification of the problems encountered in quantum physics, in particular by developing the concept of complementarily. Hereby he could show how deeply the changes in the field of physics have affected fundamental features of our scientific outlook and how the consequences of this change of attitude reach far beyond the scope of atomic physics and touch upon all domains of human knowledge. These views are discussed in a number of essays, written during the years 1933-1962. They are available in English, collected in two volumes with the title Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge and Essays 1958-1962 on Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge, edited by John Wiley and Sons, New York and London, in 1958 and 1963, respectively.

[…]

During the Nazi occupation of Denmark in World War II, Bohr escaped to Sweden and spent the last two years of the war in England and America, where he became associated with the Atomic Energy Project. In his later years, he devoted his work to the peaceful application of atomic physics and to political problems arising from the development of atomic weapons. In particular, he advocated a development towards full openness between nations. His views are especially set forth in his Open Letter to the United Nations, June 9, 1950.

As a Danish Jew, Bohr barely escaped being arrested by the Nazis. Later, when he came to Los Alamos to work on the atomic bomb, he hoped that the weapon would prevent future atrocities by other would-be Hitlers. He also hoped the terrifying nature of atomic weapons would destroy not nations but the very possibility of war itself.

From Richard Rhodes’ The Making of the Atomic Bomb:

The weapon devised as an instrument of major war would end major war. It was hardly a weapon at all, the memorandum Bohr was writing in sweltering Washington emphasized; it was “a far deeper interference with the natural course of events than anything ever before attempted” and it would “completely change all future conditions of warfare.” When nuclear weapons spread to other countries, as they certainly would, no one would be able any longer to win. A spasm of mutual destruction would be possible. But not war (532).

Paging Dick Cheney. Please carefully re-read that last paragraph.

Oppenheimer had a different view — especially as he watched the Trinity Test. The atomic bomb would not eradicate war; instead, it was “the destroyer of worlds.”

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On the lighter side, I remember an episode of The Simpsons where Bart is drawing a comic book based on Homer’s funny antics when he becomes angry. In one bit, Homer is watching television and flies into a rage when he learns that a show he enjoys, When Dinosaurs Get Drunk, is being replaced with one called The Boring World of Niels Bohr.

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The image was originally rendered in Sterling-ware and post-processed with mad abandon until its physical structure was first decimated, then reconstituted.

I stepped off on Saturn

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You know, post-processing can really mangle a decent, law-abiding fractal image and make it an almost unrecognizable, but strangely delightful, wreck. Some will never walk straight again.

But when you start with an image that is almost entirely a product of the program’s filtering effect, and not quite a “fractal” image to start with, the results strain the already stretched categories of visual taxonomy, sowing the seeds of an impending visual collision, or shall we say, “Collisual” – intriguing arrangement of debris.

These were all originally made in Tierazon 2.7. Here’s a clean one that hasn’t had anything done to it. In fact it’s the original image the above one was made from.

Download parameter file “shift06.zar”


Same one – Antialiased 4:1

They’re alive. I should explain that.

This is rather Twilight-zonish, although I’m sure there’s a scientific explanation: The images keep changing.

When you see something interesting and zoom in on it, it’s gone when you get there. I think it’s because the image is created by a moire effect and the resolution of the image changes the resulting pattern of circles.

In fact, I wanted to call this series of images, “Monsieur Moire and the hypno-dots from the Atom Ray”, but it just didn’t have the same zip as stepping off on Saturn.

Well, that’s just the beginning. The really freaky thing is when you antialias one of these things (as you can see above). The resulting algorithmicolated picture transforms into something quite different; the dots are in different places and the colors have changed too.

In an image viewer, when looking at the thumbnail, you see yet another variation of the image. What you see in fact, is a new image and you can’t go by the thumbnail to find what you’re looking for. In a strange and maybe existential way, the thumbnail is not the image and doesn’t even pretend to be.

I’ve never seen anything like it. That’s why I say they’re alive, growing, changing, mutating, plotting, scheming…

Perhaps they are “fractal” after all, as far as self similarity and endless resolution goes. What you see depends on how close you are to it and at what size you make it. Or maybe that has nothing to do with fractals.

They started off in Tierazon. Then they met me. And my machine. But their fractal identity can still be traced through their dental records.

Maybe all this is in my head.
 

Postcards from Shangri-La

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Would you expect this from someone named “Ilyich the Toad”?

Once again, I’ve dug up a new and amazing Photoshop filter and I want to share the wonder…

But it’s got a dirty name.

I tried renaming it, but you can’t do that with Photoshop filters. Or at least I don’t know how. But everytime I go to use it, which is like 200 times a day, I click on Ilyich’s favorite nic name for this filter.

At first it seemed evil. The Toad connection didn’t help either. Now I’m just curious to know why he gave it such a name.

It’s one of those chop-up/multi-lens distortion effects. It doesn’t alter the color and has only two sliders, but it can be extremely creative.

After using it for a couple hours, you will have trouble readjusting to the non-chopped, real world. Unless you’re a house fly. I think this is what the world looks like to a house fly.

The Missiles of Shangri-La

That’s what I thought of the moment I made this… Can I still call it a fractal? Maybe I’ve gone too far. I’m the first to admit it.

“Kurtz got off the boat. He quit the whole scene.”

Maybe I’ll just refer to it as “Crystal.8bf”. Couldn’t he have called it “Betty’s Crystal”?

While I’m on the topic of unique labelling for menus and parameters, I ought to mention another interesting set of filters I’ve found by someone called “Kangaroo”. One filter has four sliders for adjustment, labelled: “does something” “not sure” “can’t say” and “I forgot”. Another has three sliders named: “don’t know” “don’t care” and “leave me alone”.

Sometimes when it’s late and I’ve been on the computer too long, I start to give senseless names to images when I’m saving them, like “Fuludoo” or “Fugunoofoo”. So maybe Ilyich and Kangaroo just ran out of names.

Using the sliders allows one to fragment and repeat the image in interesting ways. Instead of creating a single distorted image, you can create a series of images that are clear but have a distorted arrangement.

Go ahead, pet the fractal, he won’t bite

Honey, where are the kids? Didn’t you tell them they could go swimming?

“His mind is rational, but his soul is insane”

What started off as a cheap and gimmicky effect began to become a powerful artistic tool once I began to see what it did best and began to combine it with the India Ink filter by Flaming Pear. On its own, the crystal filter looks too fake like a cheap digital trick. But treated with the patterns of India Ink, it jumps into a whole new category of creative effects.

I think that’s one of the secrets to digital creativity: synergy -digital recombination -frankensteining. Or to put it another way: harmonizing -taking hydrogen and oxygen and making water.
 

One more time…

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What is art?

There’s an old black and white movie that spends two hours depicting a jury sitting around a table in a room, deliberating the verdict of a murder trial.

Now I could also be wrong about this too, but I think it all starts when Jimmy Stewart, who’s the only one of the twelve jurors who hasn’t quite made up his mind to sentence the young man on trial to death, decides he wants to go over things… one more time.

In doing so, everyone realizes that they’re not looking at the facts of the case at all, but rather have made up their minds to punish the accused for no other reason than they’re all just really angry at someone else in their personal lives who they can’t punish.

With the question, “Can I just go through it one more time?” the neatly rolled up guilty verdict (and resulting death sentence) starts to unravel until it finally comes completely undone, and the whole jury agrees the man is innocent and they themselves are just “12 Angry Men.”

And so it is, sometimes, with these apparently simple and obvious things like art.

Another allegory or analogy: Einstein (remember, don’t take my word for all this) would apparently spend days working on a solution to some deep, fundamental physics problem that he wasn’t satisfied with and then throw all his calculations and papers away and start over again.

You can do that with physics because everything is derived from first principles (laws, or something) and any physics problem can be solved (if you know how) by applying the handful of first principles to the complexities of any situation.

Einstein would start all over because he thought he would stumble on the answer if he could start from the beginning and go over it… one more time.

So, like Einstein at his desk, and Jimmy Stewart in the jury room, I don’t feel quite satisfied with my current understanding of things, and although I can’t really see an obvious mistake in any of it, I just want to go over it again, one more time.

So, one more time…

What is art?
 

Life is not

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Life is not for the rich and famous
for the successful applicant and the olympic few
Life is in the eye and the mind and the hand
It needs no permission,
or conditions
to be.

We can all be like Sindbad
and set off on voyages with nothing but today
We do not need to own the ocean
it is enough that we are here