prosthetic knowledge
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Digital Merzbau
Chinese project combines art, 3D printing, geometry and recursion:
Merzbau is a project by a German artist Kurt Schwitters began in 1923 in Hanover for a series of room transformation of his house. With art of collage, restructuring process, he re-used the discarded building materials from which made into furniture, walls to ceiling, creating a form of decorative and structural integration, basically following a certain design rules. Today, in the computational context, we tried to create a series of our own logic from the prototype “Merzbau”.
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Escape Velocity by Jonathan Gillie
Short abstract video featuring a collage of geometric and digital animated forms.
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Golden Parachutes by James Bills
Collection of abstract isometric mathematical artworks designed with rolling dice data - via Data Is Nature:
James Bills series of projection drawings, Golden Parachutes, are generated by random numbers obtained from a series of of polyhedral dice throws. Each aleotoric drawing uses a different system, indicated by its title (such as 1xRxR or 8x8xR), to translate those numbers into indeterminate isometric lattices characterised by spectrographic elevation columns. Gold leaf gilding punctuates the upper parts of these columns resulting in illuminated grids of squares that hover above the main architectural structures.
More at Data Is Nature Here
More works by James Bills Here
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Tri Me
Online browser-based webcam toy turns your video feed into triangulated Delaunay effect in real-time.
There are controls to play about with, as well as saving an image.
Put together by Scott Garner, you can follow his Tumblr blog for other online coding projects here
Complementary post to the earlier ‘Delaunay Painter’ web toy.
Try it out for yourself here
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Delaunay Painter
Great creative online drawing toy allows you to upload an image and ‘triangulate’ it yourself.
There are 4 modes - solid, lines, solid+lines, and simple. Images can also be saved.
Try it out for yourself here
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The Art of Owen Schuh
Mathematical art based on network systems:
Owen Schuh draws his inspiration from mathematics and complex organic systems. In particular, he is fascinated by simple sets of well-defined rules that generate unexpectedly intricate and nuanced structures. His work is painstakingly created by hand, using at most the aid of a pocket calculator.
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Geometric Sandcastles
A Flickr photoset showcasing the sand castles created by box builder:
TIME WELL SPENT I always have these ideas that I want to try but somehow in the attempt to get something done by the end of the day I turn towards my old standby solutions. I need to spend 6 weeks on the beach all at once. As it is I only get a day here and there and go whole years without building anything. If I could manage that I might get somewhere new.You can see much more here
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Seated Nude by Jean Bevis
Computer art from around 1976 created purely from computer programming instructions.
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AXIOM & SIMULATION by Mark Dorf
Photographic series where natural landscapes are seen with quantified digital eye, reduced to nodes, polygons and lines:
AXIOM & SIMULATION examines the ways in which humans quantify and explore our surroundings by comparing artistic, scientific, and digital realism. As a developed global culture, we are constantly transforming physical space and objects into abstract non-physical thought to gain a greater understanding of composition and the inner workings of our surroundings. These transformations often take the form of mathematical or scientific interpretation. As a result of these changes, we can misinerpret or even lose all reference to the source: when the calculated representation is compared to its real counterpart, an arbitrary and disconnected relationship is created in which there is very little or no physical or visual connection resulting in questions of definition. Take for example a three-dimensional rendering of a mountainside. While observing the rendering, it holds a similar form to what we see in nature but has no physical connection to reality– it is merely a file on a computer that has no mass and only holds likeness to a memory. When translating the rendering into binary code, we see just 1’s and 0’s – a file creating the representation from a language composed of only two elements that have no grounding in the natural world. After all of these transformations, a new reality is created – one without an original referent, a copy with no absolute source. When observing these simulations and interpretations of our landscape within a single context or picture plane, ideas of accuracy, futility, and original experience arise.
You can see the whole collection at Mark’s website here - he also has a Tumblr blog here
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Hypercube
Computer animation from 1965 demonstrating the concept of the 4D ‘Hypercube’, which could be viewed as a stereogram - video embedded below:
From AT&T Archives:
Two of the earliest three-dimensional computer graphics films. The films’ creator, A. Michael Noll, programmed the computer (most of this work in the Labs was done on an IBM 7094) to generate the correct stereoscopic imagery, and these images were printed side-by-side, frame by frame. They’re intended for freeviewing in 3D — i.e. the three-dimensional image is created when one views the film while cross-eyed — no special devices required. Of course, the time/movement elements bring the film into the fourth dimension.
More info here
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An algorithm for tracking viruses (and Twitter rumors) to their source
Scientific proposal for sourcing origins of viral information, from tweets and blogs to diseases (such as through a river network, pictured above) - via Gigaom:
No, Vanilla Ice isn’t dead — and if he had access to a new algorithm from Swiss researcher Pedro Pinto, the Ice Man could go all techno-ninja and track down who started the rumor claiming he was. That’s because Pinto and his colleagues at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne have developed an algorithm for finding the source of such rumors, as well as viruses (physical and digital) and other maladies, even across highly complex networks.
Their method, according to an abstract of a paper just published in Physical Review Letters, is ideal for situations where there is relatively little data to work with, and is “based on the principles used by telecommunication towers to pinpoint cell phone users.” Essentially, the algorithm starts by looking at a small collection of points within a network and working back from there to determine the origin, kind of like how investigators can zero in on a cell phone’s location using triangulation. The more connections, or observers, a particular point has, the fewer that are needed to track down the source point.
… Pinto explains that his team’s method could also be used for everything from identifying the source of a computer virus to determining the blogs most likely to make web content go viral to preventing the spread of an epidemic or chemical attack by learning how it’s spreading.
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Further Abstracts by Alma Alloro
Geometric abstract animated Gifs formed with graph paper and coloured pens:
“Further Abstracts seems to be a forming contemporary statement on the classic theoretical and ideological assertions of Alloro’s later studies in the Bauhaus University of Weimar, Germany. In pen drawings on architectural paper, later developed into short frenetic animation pieces, Alloro revives the Bauhaus movement’s celebrated core symbols (the triangle, square and circle), only to subvert their refined ideology of functional beauty. Replacing iconic solid colors with a hyper-saturated radiance, the bare technical grid-aesthetics of these corrupted Bauhaus designs render the modern myth of functionality obsolete. Lacking a decisive objective or directing ideology, Alloro’s practice parades these founding modernistic national elements into an amusing low-tech salad of dysfunctional glitch. Just like the action of a frustrated web user, stubbornly re-clicking on a computer icon whose link is broken, the line between distinct function and abstract causality breaks down.” — Gabriel S. Moses
There are 6 of them (and better quality as the examples above diminished from reducing the file size), but you can check them all here
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Google Calculator
If you type in a simple math question (ie 2*2), a calculator interface will appear at the top of the results.
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One of the First Computer-Generated Films, from 1963 - AT&T Archives
A short, simple 3D animation of a satellite object orbiting a globe:
This film was a specific project to define how a particular type of satellite would move through space. Edward E. Zajac made, and narrated, the film, which is considered to be possibly the very first computer graphics film ever. Zajac programmed the calculations in FORTRAN, then used a program written by Zajac’s colleague, Frank Sinden, called ORBIT. The original computations were fed into the computer via punch cards, then the output was printed onto microfilm using the General Dynamics Electronics Stromberg-Carlson 4020 microfilm recorder. All computer processing was done on an IBM 7090 or 7094 series computer.
Zajac didn’t make the film to demonstrate computer graphics, however. Instead, he was interested in real-time modeling of a certain theoretical construct. At the time, The Bell System was still deeply engaged in satellite research, having launched Telstar the previous year, with plans to continue developing communications satellites. Zajac’s model is of a box (“satellite”), with two gyroscopes within. In the film, he was trying to create a simulation of movement — the pitch, roll, and yaw within that system.
