prosthetic knowledge

Laser Cut Street Map Videos 

CutMaps is an Etsy store which creates intricate mountable street maps cut from boards and framed. Here are two videos showing the process in action:

Cut Maps are laser cut street maps of the world’s most famous and recognizable cities. These maps are cut from high quality recycled mounting board and framed. You may choose any color combination you wish.

More at CutMaps here

New Media - New Environments

This was my entry for the Transfer3D - Speed Show WROCŁAW, an experiment with Autodesk 1234D and a televised interview from 1967 with technology theorist Marshall McLuhan:

Brief:

Create a piece of work for the Transfer3D SPEED SHOW WROCŁAW, around the concept of 3D

Idea:

Advances in 3D imaging and technology has provided interesting possibilities to explore. In particular, there is a service which can convert multiple still digital photographs into a virtual 3D object called Autodesk 123D Catch.

With some understanding of the principles of how it works, it somehow lead me to connect to one of the most important figures in technological thought of the last 50 years: Marshall McLuhan. Having ideas with no single fixed viewpoint, employing ‘Probes’ to understand technological phenomena from various angles, and an influence from the texts of James Joyce and the concepts of Modernism, a connection can be made between both the thinker and the machine.

In 1967, he undertook a televised interview, sitting in a revolving chair in the centre of the stage, surrounded by an audience asking questions from all angles (see video embedded below):

Herbert Marshall McLuhan @ CBC 1967 from Sergey Teterin on Vimeo.

I took various frames from the footage to form the necessary collection to help create a potential model, all from various angles and different levels of proximity.

The results are a product of matching images and manually places points connecting the images to one another on particular key features of the person.

(See animated gifs above)

Result:

Admittedly, I was hoping to produce a virtual sculptural bust of Marshall Mcluhan, but the 1234D Catch service is designed for colour photography - the images I have used are black and white, grainy, and have been processed from original recording, to video, and eventually digitally processed onto online video services. Also, the subject must be completely still - it is difficult to find exact poses from various angles from someone who is in conversation with his audience throughout the recording.

Many of the attempts are, in relation to my initial plans, extremely disappointing in a representational sense, as well as some questionable orientations - upside down or positioned to the side as opposed to standing upright as would be expected.

My only consolation with the various outputs I have collected are that they still connect to the ideas of multiple viewpoints, abstract forms created from various points and time - machine vision generating pseudo-Cubism virtual sculptures.

The project should be considered a fully-finalized product, more of an experiment which, in theory, could provide other objects with continued practice, trying out different frames and combinations.

You can check some of the examples on my Autodesk 123D Catch profile here

The Art of Hong Zi 

Artist creates works with distortion effect by painting on threaded canvas which is subsequently rethreaded. It is easy to see a connection to contemporary technological distortion aesthetics, but is actually inspired via a Buddhist background:

Hongzi’s works are the products of two repetitive tasks - piling up colored threads and breaking them up again …

… If so, what is the reason why the task needs to be emphasized? It is needed to consider that the career of Hongzi started from her Buddhist painting. Furthermore the effect of her career as such appears strongly as shown in her comparing her works to sand mandala or her introducing the themes of her works as the process of generation and extinction. If it is the case, it will be no problem to say the laboriously repetitive work for tying and untying threads is the transformed form of the laboriously repetitive work for producing Buddhist paintings. When considering such repetitive work is the process of practicing asceticism to empty the minds, there is no reason not to say Hongzi’s task is also an another form of asceticism. Hongzi’s task facing the fact there is no fixed form, tying and untying threads one by one, looks to be so faithful to the teachings of Buddhism.

You can discover more of the artist’s work at their website here

Process Watch by Katja Novitskova 

Digital print for one-day art show featuring a collage of infographic data of that day:

On June 27th 2012 I did Hotel Palenque, a curatorial project of Elise Lammer. Hotel Palenque is about inviting an artist to do a one-day show that proposes two conditions: making an A0 print, and deleting the files used to make it.

Process Watch is a digital collage inframed in a outdoor poster display with two key-locks. Collage was made a few hours before the opening out of several types of real-time data from the day of the exhibition: weather reports from various cities around the world, currency exchange rates, stock exchange statistics, commodity prices, satellite footage, Moon phase and location, etc. The data gathered in the form of screenshots from the internet was then assembled in Photoshop. Fundamentally unique occurence of particular weather and economic conditions of the day were further intensified by freehand digital tool use. The print is locked in a frame and will exist as a singular piece - a document to the reality of the moment and a product of the conditions that led to it.

More Here

Pictures from a Gallery by Lillian Schwartz 

A recent upload from computer artist pioneer’s YouTube account - a film from 1976 of computer processed photographs of the artist’s family. Embedded below:

From her website:

Music by Albert Miller. Picture-processed photos from the artist-filmmaker’s family. Faces are abstracted in a divisionistic manner. “… one of the great motion pictures of our time. While embracing the full range of human activity from cradle to old age, the production illuminates with deep feeling the many elements of present-day technology in filmmaking and the expanded cinema. It is truly a work of genius.” – John W. L. Russell, International Media Coordinator, USIA. Awards – Golden Eagle-Cine 1976; Grenoble Film Festival Award 1976, International Women’s Film Festival 1976. Cannes Film Festival. (7 min.)

PK Note: What I found interesting (other than the obvious filter-like contemporary conversion of the images) is the many technologies this film has gone through to arrive here, on a webpage via YouTube, and that can still be considered part of the conceptual piece. Here we have computer-manipulated imagery that was transferred and edited onto film, which since has been transferred to digital media (as you will notice in the last 30 seconds, unintentionally becoming part of the experience of the work), then put online.

Pixel Vase Casting Machine 

Julian F Bond has made a sculpture tool to create clay vases with a blocky pixel / voxel like exterior. Video embedded below:

Julian Bond’s pixel vases are produced using a mould that is made up of over 1300 individual plaster sticks, measuring 10*10mm, which are able to be moved individually to form unique shapes. This is unlike a normal slip casting mould in that the mould is not fixed. Once the user is happy with the design, clay slip is poured into the mould. The cast vessel is then removed and fired. The technique allows rapid manufacturing of individual ceramic objects; the simplicity of the machine also means that someone that has no experience in ceramics can use it to produce their own pieces. JulianFBond.co.uk

[Via Yatzer]

Inside Out 

Photographic images created from examining camera film ingested by Josh Lake and Luke Evans:

With fellow student Josh Lake, photographic 35mm film was eaten,
digested then excreted out in the dark.

The damage and traces left on the emulsion surface were examined
through a scanning electron microscope.

[Source]

Seed (P_Ball) by MATSYS

Large cell-like sculpture whose formation is based on natural processes:

Description: The latest iteration of the “P” series of projects (P_Wall(2009), P_Wall (2006), P_Wall (Weathering)), the Seed takes the series into a new dimension. Inspired by the vitality of the Redwood Grove at the UC Botanical Garden, the Seed attempts to embody the fertility, wonder, and strength of the redwoods through the placement of this mysterious concrete object within the Grove. The form is composed of 32 thin-shell fiber-reinforced concrete panels that are based off of plaster patterns made from casting liquid plaster into fabric forms. The fabric expands under the mass of the plaster slurry until it finds a state of equilibrium with the tensioned fabric. This play between the pressure of the liquid versus the tension in the fabric fibers mirrors the dynamic conflict that exists within every cell of organic bodies.

More Here

Seed Drawings by Clement Valla 

Ongoing art series which looks like computer generative art, is actually a product of thousands of drawings by people:

Each Seed Drawing is an aggregate of many smaller drawings, all produced as copies of one another.
Over a 3 month period, thousands of individuals were solicited to copy small simple line drawings, through an online labor marketplace called Amazon Mechanical Turk. As each copy was completed, it in turn was replicated by other Mechanical Turk workers. Each drawing is produced by a single individual with no knowledge of the overall forms and structure within the larger drawing.
The iterative process of copying produces growth-like structures in which different patterns of influence and large-scale structures emerge. These larger drawing characteristics are purely the result of local interactions; beyond the writing of the algorithm, no single individual is making larger decisions for the group.

More Here

3D Printed Chairs Made From Recycled E-Waste

Interesting project that combines ecology, design, and robotics. Electronic waste gets grounded into a paste which is used as the material to construct a chair by a robotic arm. From Inhabitat:

Dirk Vander Kooij is set to unveil a new line of “Endless” furniture made from recycled e-waste at “The Future in the Making”, an exhibition organised by Domus that will take place during Milan Design Week 2012 …

… The Endless robot uses ground-up plastic from old refrigerators and squeezes it in a continuous thread, layer by layer, to form pieces of furniture. This kind of low-resolution 3D printing can produce a chair in just 3 hours. The technology also enables the designer to modify a model after a piece of furniture is produced – a bonus that the traditional injection moulding process doesn’t offer. The machine can be programmed to build furniture of any shape and size.

Here is a video of the whole process in action - highly recommended

More information can be found at Inhabitat here

Nudes by Thomas Ruff

Project from 2003 taking pornographic images from the web and processing them. From File Magazine:

In 2003 photographer Thomas Ruff published a photographic collection of “Nudes” with a text by the French author Michel Houellebecq. Ruff’s images here are based on Internet pornography, which was digitally processed and obscured without any camera or traditional photographic device. In 2009, the Aperture Foundation in New York published jpegs, a large-scale book dedicated exclusively to his monumental series of pixilated enlargements of internet-culled images, all compressed using the standard JPEG format.

Lycopodiumprints by Raphael Hefti

Photograms on photographic color paper using the gently burning spores of the mossplant Lycopdium

Via We Find Wildness

How to Make a Salt Print via Dulce Photography

Alternative method for creating photographic prints - the first step requires table salt and water (but you will need Silver Nitrate and other chemicals later):

One of the classes I’m taking this semester is called Contemporary Photography, a class where we learn lots of alternative printing processes (same class I made Mr. Pinhole for). Well, I was recently assigned to teach and give the class a demonstration on the Salted Paper Process, or salt prints. I figured, why not share this information with all of you? … It’s actually quite simple, and something you can do from your own home! All it takes is a little table salt and a few chemicals…

Instructions Here

 Amourette (Schadograph no. 4) by Christian Schad (1919)

A photogram - an image created from photographic processes, but not with a camera:

The artist’s “schadographs” are among the earliest intentionally abstract photographs. Using the cameraless photogram technique—in existence since the discovery of photography but previously unused for artistic purposes—Schad covered the surfaces of light-sensitive paper with various objects and then left them to develop by his windowsill. He preferred worn materials, such as scraps of paper and bits of fabric, often searching for these things on the streets and in garbage cans. Schad frequently extended his assault on artistic tradition by cutting a jagged border around the schadographs, “to free them,” as he explained, “from the convention of the square.”

Link to MoMA

Color Space by Ryan Boatright

A printmaking project with a conceptual process of degrading images:

These custom prints depict color swapped realities of common spaces and their objects- the colors from one person’s space were replaced with the colors from another person’s space. The resolutions were inspired by a painting process used by my father who creates different sized grids on canvas to facilitate the act of accurately reproducing a photographic image, block-by-block. 

About the Process:

-Colors are deduced to 12 possibilities.

-Colors from one image are replaced with those of the same scene from another person’s image.
-Print separations are made from each of the 12 colors, with different resolutions.
-Each color/resolution is printed separately with a pigment inkjet printer. There are around 12 printings on each piece of paper.

More information of the process + other examples of the set can be found here