Constructivist Study - Steve Mason & Portrait - Chris Scarborough

Microblogged: recent selected tweets from my Twitter stream. Note: Some tweets have additional descriptions, overriding their original 140 character limit.

Lightning Fields - The dendritic aesthetics of electrical discharges on photographic dry plates - Hiroshi Sugimoto.

Atlaseobscura reports on the Morning Glory Pool, a natural wonder at the point of environmental disaster. The bright concentric colour bands are generated by Thermophilic Bacteria.

Christian Bok’s ‘The Xenotext’ Experiment is a literary exercise that explores the aesthetic potential of genetics to create a poem, doing so in order to make literal the renowned aphorism of William S Burroughs, who declared “the word is now a virus.”

16-bit Intel 8088 chip, a poem by Charles Bukowski, laments the incompatibility between certain types of, now obsolete, data storage formats.

Sonumbra, by Loop, is a sonic parasol utilising electroluminescent fibres.

Julie Karabenick creates geometric pixillated abstractions, their pulsing circuits contain the ghost of Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie.

Mitchell Whitelaw creates transduced weather jewelry in the form of a 3D printed bracelet, the form is derived from 365 days of local weather data.

Lightning Fields - Hiroshi Sugimoto & Weather Bracelet - Mitchell Whitelaw

Constructivist Study by Steve Mason. A generative set of cubes expand and sprawl into a randomised anti-gravitorial composition.

Digital Acoustic Cartography, by Daniel Rothaug, is an interactive experiment in mapping sonic events into a concrete visual language.

Andre Michelle has implemented an audio reactive version the Superformula in Actionscript 3.

Subblue creates a 4D Quaternion Julia Set Ray Tracer that generates extra dimensional curvaceous forms of self-similarity.

In conjunction with The Wire magazine, some music of constraint. 22 musical compositions by artists from around the world, where each piece was created with just 140 characters of code in SuperCollider.

Melvin Galapon’s prints explore computer monitor pixel geometry and strobing effect of TV static in a minimal graphic fashion.

Ant Scott’s Repetitive Beats series of prints are created using his flat panel luminograph technique. The results have the trademark broken glitch aesthetic. Listening closely we hear the scattered techno of neo-Op-Art .

Chris Scarborough’s drawing evokes a kind of deconstructed, Arcimboldo-esque transformer portrait.

The un-making of a Cyborg (detail) – Scloopy & Foldable Fractal 2.0 - Sanch

Scloopy’s ‘The un-making of a Cyborg’ contains a set of compositions of wirey extrusions and explosions. As the title suggests the structures pertain to the deconstruction of a some kind of robotic/cybernetic entity. A Processing script was used to generate the shapes which were then imported into Cinema4d for final rendering.

Sanch has recently documented his Foldable Fractal piece, originaly created during the Generator.x 2.0: Beyond The Screen workshop held by Marius Watz, in Berlin in 2007. Sanch utilised an L-System algorithm in VVVV to generate cutting paths, the material was then half-cut using lasers enabling it to be folded in a succession of recursive pentagonal shapes.

Flight 404 has uploaded some new images to his Magnetic Architecture set. Particularly recommended are the photographs of the monochromatic prints that were shown the McLeod Residence gallery in Seattle. Dense, and highly detailed, multi-form particle structures were generated in Processing using Perlin Noise and controlled by gravitational forces.

8*8*8 & 9 (detail) - Erwin Keustermans

Erwin Keustermans has created a number of hand drawings using the human equivalent of a sub-divisioning algorithm (as well as a number of other process based systems). The ‘Patterns by Partition’ collection derive two dimensional circular networks from this simple repetitive process of gesture constraint. The circular lattices in the set of works made for the Museum Dr. Guislain occasionally allude to plant forms. 6*6*6*6*6 compares well to the genus of Taraxacum, for example. Elsewhere in this set, the symmetrical aligned shapes begin to become populated by biomorphic shapes, botanical ephemera, and personages. 1001 pays homage to the well known ‘outsider’ artist Adolf Wölfli, incorporating his style of drawing into the compositions.

Erwin’s Cubes set contain motifs with notable similarity to Rangoli - a form of sand/flour painting decoration found in the doorways of homes in India. Rangoli patterns are constructed by connecting a matrix of dots in a procedural way to create symmetrical ornamentation. Similarly Erwin intersperses the sub-divided shape patterns with dots, in the case of 8×8x8 there is also the illusion of a flattened hyperbolic sphere. These pieces further confronts us with the possibility of a combinatorial set of board games, with various species of, as yet, unfathomable Draughts and/or Go board alternatives. The set of cube drawings are mounted together to form the impressive geometric sculpture - The Cabinet of Cubic Partitions.

A Secret Distant Measurement (detail) & Sequence III (detail) - Reed Danziger

Reed Danziger’s paintings are filled with process based gestures, crystalline facets, geometric repetitions, biomorphic multiplicities and network-like structures. Natural colours allude to natural processes, the weathering of rock into generative forms, the splatters of paint into definable patterns. A tensile force system seems to exists between groups of elements, its as if the collective ecosystem was about to reconfigure into a new landscape at the next instant. Occasionally amid the particles, shards, splatters and facets, molecular structures evolve and mathematical grids appear. These are little hints at the underlying connection between the graphical representation of systems, the classification of processes and the actual forms of the things being represented themselves.

Related:
Julie Mehretu - Psychogeographic paintings

Invisible Commitment - Oli Laurelle

Invisible Commitment is a print project by Oli Laurelle the sets about visualising SVN logs (as well as Pure Data and SuperCollider source code) by representing various attributes and parameters with tree-like and branching structures. SVN, also known as Subversion, is a version-control system allowing developers to maintain current and historical versions of files, typically development source code.

Oli uses recursive algorithms to parse his data into Processing. The typical branching structures are a common schematic arrived at from such divide and conquer methodologies where problems are solved by solving smaller and smaller instances.

The SVN folder structures generate the main branches of the tree, their thickness indicating the frequencies as which individual developers have accessed files within. Branch length further denotes the number of sub-folders contained within each folder. Fruits at the end of each branch represent the type of file contained by accessing the specific file extension(s).

The style of the final renders have something of the spatial qualities associated with Chinese scroll paintings, this aspect being accentuated by seal-like red blocks positioned at the bottom of each composition. These seals, or stamps as Oli refers to them, contain information regarding who was involved in the project - including the names of the developers and duration of time they were involved.

This project uses open-source visualisation software (Processing) to visualise the working of an open source application (SVN) and was presented at a festival of open-source and free software, the Make Art Festival, held in France in December 2009.

Geospaces - Hubert Blanz

The similarities between the schematics of PCB’s (printed circuit boards) and the layout of towns and cities has been noted extensively. In both cases typical constraints derived from functionality generates grid-like orderings of items and objects with similar scale distributions. In both, the transportation of materials is explicit and that flow is regarded as one of the paramount aspects to planning, whether it be the flow of people, goods, electrons, or data.

Hubert Blanz Geospaces C-Prints take this isomorphism to its logical limit, to a point where both cities and circuit boards merge into one, and where the macro and micro scales contain each other. The components in Hubert’s city circuits are cleverly positioned to temp the viewer into making specific associations. Varying shades of green hint at different kinds of neighbourhoods, for example, and circular elements appear as concert halls or auditoriums.

A great book documenting PCBs from both an artistic and historical point of view is the out of print ‘Information Art: Diagramming Microchips’ by Cara McCarty. You can find some images from the book here.

Magic Forest - Andrew Carnie & Videos of pond life - Antonio Guillén

Microblogged: recent selected tweets from my Twitter stream.

Microscopic manoeuvres, Amoebic transformations & Protozoic propulsions. Videos of pond life from Antonio Guillén.

Terminal Mirage - Aerial photographs of environmentally impacted sites by Dave Maisel.

Two Boxes at Once – Old School computational Op Art from 1979 by Mark McKernin.

Chromointerferences - Perceptual work by Carlos Cruz-Diez recently on show at The Mayor Gallery, London.

Multiverse, by Leo Villareal, a 200 foot long light installation that uses 41,000 programmed LED’s.

SoniCoumn -An Interactive kinetic light pattern sculpture by Jin-Yo Mo.

Rhonda - A real-time 3d drawing application from Amit Pitaru and James Paterson.

Melissa Manfull has produced a series of intricate process drawings evocative of organic systems and processes.

Revisitingg Aspen Magazine on-line, particularly No9 which was edited by Angus & Hetty Maclise.

A Random Mechanical Cascade - Randomisation via games of chance and the law of frequency of error at Cabinet Magazine.

Two Boxes at Once - Mark McKernin & Dream Music/Keyboard Study #2 - La Monte Young

Natural History of the Enigma - Eduardo Kac implants his own genes into a Petunia to create a transgenic flower.

Max Frey constructs Rotoscopic light-drawing works.

Sarah Moli Newton Applebaum has instigated some colourful knitting invasions.

Kosmograd reports on Orville Simpson II, who for 70 years, has been dreaming of the utopian community of Victory City.

Petra Kempfs beautiful ‘You are the City’ publication. 22 conceptual layers and frameworks of a city [Also via Kosmograd].

The Visual Context of Music. More non-standard musical notation and esoteric scores at BibliOdyssey.

Auto-configuring robots, are of course where it’s at. Here are some from the Polymorphic Robots Lab.

And yet more biologically inspired self-assembling modular robots at SpatialRobots.

Micro-organisms ‘predict’ how their environs may change in the future, based on how they have changed in the past via Seedmagazine.

Emergent behaviour in Ant colonies used to understand group behaviour of neurons. Gives a new meaning to Hive Mind.

Magic Forest - Andrew Carnie’s Neuroscientific artwork tracking the growth & organisation of neurones in the brain.

The MandelBulb – Daniel White

Once in a while a new species of self-similarity jumps out of the screen contrasting itself against an otherwise clichéd gang of garish and well-worn looking fractals. The Mandelbulb is an extruded 3d implementation of the well-known Mandelbrot iterative function developed by Daniel White. This particular chaotic expulsion generates organic looking surfaces complete with baroque vegetation - its not hard to imagine a forest of Romanesque cauliflowers invading a small cave, growing in clumps of (a)symmetry.

As well as the botanical, the Mandelbulb also alludes to the geological. Contained within the complex forms are rocky striations and eroded sedimentations. Some of the renders have a distinctly plastery feel to them – envisage the work of a hyper industrious Artex artisan hooked on Hofstader.

Related:
Julya Sets & Fractal Cities
Results 1 - 20 of about 156,000 for Fractal

Asteroids (detail), 2006 & Pressure Drop (detail), 2005

In works like Asteroids and Pressure Drop Vic Haven employs the intersection of lines to create the illusion of distorted tessellations and crystal-like structures. If the ordered flat plane dynamics of a decorative Moorish tiling was allowed to unravel under an imagined elastic tension the resultant pattern might bare a lot in common with Asteroids. The system of tensile forces pull apart the network apart to create the illusion of a non-uniform façade - in between negative star (or Asteroid) shaped spaces are formed from the tangle.

This segmentation and triangulation technique is used in profusion in much of Vic’s work. In Infrastructure, mirrored Mylar on Polypropylene is cut to create a landscape dense with the connections of possible transportation links or power supply lines. But, as the exhibition statement reminds us, these links might also demarcate invisible structures – communication networks or even moral/religious belief systems.

BridgeFill04 0001 - Marius Watz’s & Field-856 - Toxi

Marius Watz’s recently documented generative piece, Bridge Hypothesis, was made for ‘Bright Nights’ a projection event connected with the centennial celebration of the Manhattan Bridge. The work is marked by a strong sense of colour combined with some complex compositions of individual elements. These elements take the form of branching structures which spread into space of their own accord with ‘no regard for gravity.’

Toxi’s [Karsten Schmidt] Onedotzero set documents his identity generator software, developed in collaboration with W+K, for the AV festival of the same name. The piece, which was projected onto the facade of BFI in London, concerns itself with the mathematics behind magnetic fields. In keeping with the open source ethos Toxi has released the entire engine for you play around with. Furthermore there is Flickr group documenting hacks, remixes and extensions of the code.

As with the previous two artists, Kat Masback is no stranger to these pages. A recent Flickr set, Proslop extends an idea she first presented to us for the Biomorph addition of Vague Terrain. Dice throws are used as a generative device to create combinatorial drawings with structures derived from random number sequences.

Twists and Turns – Mandj98 & Corkscrew Canyon – Brentbat

The slot valleys of Antelope Canyon, Arizona, are a beautiful example of the (de)generative process of aqueous erosion of sandstone rock. Technically known as Slot Valleys, these pre-historic canyons have been carved via a millennia of fast intermittent flowing waters, the result of yearly monsoons.

The vortices and whorls have left their mark in the walls of the rock which incorporate smooth undulations and spiral formations, all the more accentuated by the combination of light penetrating the surfaces of the red-orange rock.

‘Some canyons measure less than a yard across at the top but drop a hundred feet or more from the rim to the natural floor. Slots are cut and scoured by water and wind with the striations of the sandstone becoming almost incandescent. Seen from the surface, a slot canyon appears as a slash. From within you find a palette of colours transmuted by light filtering down from above and bouncing from wall to wall.’

Since the sandstone has the qualities of particulate matter, it makes the process of erosion a suitable candidate for computational modelling and simulation. These kinds spatio-temporal emergent patterns are readily simulated by Cellular Automata systems. Acolytes of the Universal Computation paradigm will feel comfortable with the idea that time-space ordering of these shapes is nothing more that an immensely long and complex hydro-dynamic ‘computer program’.

Geo Mutants - Danilo Arsic

The predilection for recursive subdivisioning processes combined with a penchant for radiolaria-like structures seems to have generated a micro movement, of sorts, within the generative art and parametric architecture scene. Computational artisans are creating whole new species of fantastic shell like forms with intricate geometries, that Ernst Haeckle himself would have no doubt enjoyed - if he were around today.

The Geo Mutant’s Flickr series by Danilo Arsic are a good example of geodesic deformations, which bear a good resemblance to complex microscopic exoskeletons of tiny sea plants.

Danilo explains the process involved:

‘First i wrote a script to make a geodesic sphere. Then another script to differentiate cell opening and point position. I used attractors, file textures and random number to differentiate the generic sphere. then i smoothed them out’

Related posts:
Year of the Radiolaria
Vague Terrain 14: Biomorph

Temari spheres - NanaAkua

A recent wander through the outer suburbs of Flickrville yielded an exciting find – a set of Temari spheres, decorative thread balls combining mathematical principles, as well a love of colourful decoration. Originally developed in China and later spreading to Japan, Temari were traditionally made by grandmothers to give to their grand children. These engaging kaleidoscopic sphere’s have a something in common with Friedrich Froebel’s gifts as a way of introducing young children to the beauty of geometry and engaging them in the subjects of symmetry and tessellation through expertly crafted tactile objects. Froebel, the founder of the Kindergarten model, is well know for designing eductional puzzle like objects, known as Froebel Gifts, which encouraged geometric thinking and pattern building activities.

NanaAkua’s Flickr set [link above] contains a staggering 486 threadballs designed and made by her grandmother, now in her 80’s, who combines an excellent choice colours with a discerning eye for pattern. Also worth a visit is the Temari Flickr group.

Fragment - Jonas Loh, Steffen Fiedler & Wind Movement Visualisation - Miska

Wertarbeit’s Flickr stream collates screen grabs of Jonas Loh’s & Steffen Fiedler’s bachelor thesis ‘IDENTITÄT – The Gestalt of digital identity’ which examines ways in which digital identities can be generated from personal datasets. Scape uses a 2-dimensional particle system which is then extruded to create a personal data landscape. Fragment takes the form of a typical network schema creating delicate non-uniform lattices representing online behaviours of specific individuals.

Miska has produced a large set of slit-scan works documenting journeys via plane and train, as well as temporal journeys through time while the position of her camera remains fixed. The spatio-temporal image of a flight from Helsinki to Paris not only reveals cloud levels and densities during the journey but also alludes to ice particle patterns forming on the surface of a plane window while it is in flight. The slit-scan visualisation of a river boat trip along banks the River Seine show Paris to be the results of a spectral analysis where the horizontal maxima represent the brightness of street lights. Another Flickr set reveals a wind movement visualisation or wind-drawing - a process whereby a wind data-trace is converted into a sculptural form using a CNC milling machine.

Hexadron - Michael Hansmeyer & Radiolaria Study - Robert Hodgin

Back in early 2009 Greg Smith dropped Dataisnature a line with an invitation to curate an issue of Vague Terrain - the web journal of digital arts he launched in collaboration with Neil Wiernik back in fall 2005. Being a long time fan of both Vague Terrain and Greg’s personal online writing project Serial Consign, I leapt at the chance and decided to work with a topic dear to the heart of dataisnature. One of the central themes over the past 5 years of this weblog is the use of code by artists to create biological simulations, algorithmic botany and computational ecosystems. Drawing on some of my favourite artists working within this paradigm, and featured on this blog, the idea of VT:14 Biomorph came into being. 10 Artists/writers/architects were invited to submit work.

Some keywords and ideas to reflect upon were: Morphogenesis, Algorithmic Botany, Emergence, Genetic Algorithms, Cellular Automata, L-systems, Bacterial Aesthetics, Biomineralisation, Autogenesis, Self-generation; Cellular Division, Cosmobiotechnics, Biomimicry and DNA sequences.

VT14 showcases the work of Kat Masback, Daniel Widrig, Biothing, Robert Hodgin, Emma McNally, Jon McCabe, Michael Hansmeyer, Wilfred Hou Je Bek, David Lu and Marc Fornes. You will find Cosmobiotechnic drawings and biochemical schemas, form-finding, algorithmic and emergent architecture, work inspired by Alan Turing and Ernst Haeckle, and a conjectural piece of Bacteriopoetics to boot.

Vague Terrain 14: Biomorph can be viewed here.

Oscillating between being a single creature and a democratic swarm the lowly but incredible slime mould, famed for being a paragon of emergent behaviour, can self-organise itself into a multitude of ultra aesthetic formations.

Englishrussia has an impressive selection of slime mould photographs to inspire and enthral - globular shapes coalescent into pristine geometric and organic multiforms.

Myriorama’s Myxomycetes Flickr set explores the non-linear dynamics of these gooey heterotrophs, revealing molecular chain formations, jellyfied glyphs, and protean branching structures. The latter mould, aside from being a contender for the queen of the forest catwalk, also has another impressive claim to fame. Physarum Polycephalum, also known as ‘the many headed slime’ can navigate a maze to find its own food.

‘Slime moulds are really groups of tiny amoeba which are normally sliding around the forest floor individually. Occasionally they will coalesce into a larger blob. There is no central commander telling the individual cells when to come together or disperse. Like ants, they use pheromone trails. The individual cells release pheromones based on their assessment of the conditions. Using a type of chemical democracy, when the pheromone trail gets intense enough the slime mould cells pile together to form a larger being.’

Click here to read more about how the slime mould can solve a maze.

Recently Physarum Polycephalum also courted some fame in the robotics world by being able to ‘control’ a simple six-legged robot. Sensing the slime’s chemical reaction to light the slimebot crawled away from light sources, becoming a ‘mechanical embodiment’ of the moulds intentions.

Goldenwood Shores - Ross Racine & Non-standard musical notation - Strangetractor

Microblogged: Selected Tweets, during June 2008, from my Twitter stream:

For non-standard notation aficionados - staves and musical maps at Strangetractor.

Circuit board aesthetics - recent work from Mark Wilson, plus an in-depth interview with the artist at Geoform.

Earth morphologies - beautiful photographs by Bernhard Edmaie.

‘Broken lines of thought, false statements & fictional scenarios’ - thoughtful work by Jørgen Lello & Tobias Arnell.

Geodesic Outposts - the work of Will Yackulic, plus interview at Libbysniche.

‘Catching up with the temporal horizon’ & other very small code-based artworks (Microcodes) - Pall Thayer.

Decryptopattern, Cymatic experiments by Daisuke Ishida & Noriko Yamaguchi.

The freehand suburbs of Subdivisionville – work from Ross Racine.

Dense fractures, rhizomes, filaments & structures - 2009 Flickrs from ‘I Aint An Artist.’

Green Desert (detail) - Bernhard Edmaie & Through 150 dry wellbores (detail) - Torgeir Husevaag

Carvalhais is collating his readings on Rudy Rucker, Steven Wolfram, Cellular Automata, Universal Computation, & Computation philosophy.

Worlds first Digital Still Camera (1975) at Wired. It took 23 seconds to record a 100 line image to tape.

Mmmm this is what fresh data should sound like - Twypewriter, a Twitter typewriter.

Galaxies forming along filaments – The sculptural work of Tomas Saraceno.

Pixillation modulations – perceptual grids made in Processing by Xosé Salgado.

A myriad of visualisations of randomness at Randomwalk.

Karl Kliem’s synaesthetic visuals for Trioon by Alvo Noto & Ryuichi Sakamoto.

Map Projects by Torgeir Husevaag. Works informed by the great meta-mappers Borges and Calvino.

Whimsical schematics from Casanieva on Flickr.

Microgravitorial water droplet from inside the International Space Station.

Brilliant Noise by Semiconductor. Solar winds of radio wave frequencies.

Aeolian earth processing. La morfología de las dunas.

Pointillist imitations by Lego Artbot from Nils Völker.

Utopia installation(s) - Heike Weber

Much of Heike Weber’s work deals with multiform decoration brought about by a considered repetition of patterns, motifs and lines. In the Utopia installation a wall covered mass of undulating lines, in close proximity, create the illusion of mountainous landscapes and isogramic topologies.

Heike’s Kilim series of paintings use either acrylic paint or silicon to map out ornate figures and patterns. In the acrylic versions gravity is allowed to play its role in the creation process creating vertical drips which provide a counterpoint to more gestural marks.

Spotted at Moonriver

Zoosemiotics & Butterfly in the Brain - Suzanne Anker

Suzanne Anker’s work deals with biological, morphological and genetic themes. Works like Codex Genome and Zoosemiotics invoke the idea of a universal biological language, in the latter chromosome shaped glyphs form a secret script.

Utilising bilateral symmetry, her Butterfly in the Brain installation and rapid-prototyped Rorschach Series address the perennial fascination in recognising animals, faces, insects and apparitions, as well as fetishes and phobias, out of apparently innocuous organic mirrored shapes.

Geom.III (detail) – Re:void & Nonsense Chart No.4 (detail) - 1chord_&_a_fib

Re:void’s ‘Geom’ Flickr set applies translucent natural colours to create cubist-like extrusions where segments float along 3 dimension paths. According to Re:void ‘The output of a brush is based on mouse-gestures & random parameters’ Colours are taken from pictures, in conjunction with pre-defined pallets.’

1chord_&_a_fib’s ‘Nonsense Info Graphics’ set visualises groups of imagined datasets, again in considered colours. Various graphical symbols are combined with abstract geometries. The hieroglyphics on each appear to denote data from the future or the past, or perhaps the studies of an alien community trying to contact us form a distant solar system.

Cedison’s ‘Pleat Technique’ set contains some interesting origami structures - curious organic shell-like objects and Aztec temple architectures arise from pleat processing.

Richard Heeks photographs of bubbles during the moment of bursting reveal the hidden explosions of soapy water when the iridescent elastic sheet of surface tension gives in to external air turbulence.

Spomenik #5 & #6 - Jan Kempenaer

The recent trend in constructing imaginary buildings using photo-realistic montage techniques begged Dataisnature to ask whether the structures in Jan Kempenaer’s photographs of Yugoslavian Communist monuments were actually real at first. His Spomenik (literally ‘monument’) series presents, what seems like, alien architectures, large scale concrete wildstyle extrusions, solidified archigramesque pods and geometric military forts. All appear outlandish in their forgotten and dilapidate state. Disconnected from time, they could all be contenders for the setting of conjectural film version of Borge’s elliptical story ‘The Circular Ruins’.

Related:
Frédéric Chaubin - Cosmic Communist Constructions Photographed

Stereo.types - Ebon Heath

Brooklyn based Ebon Heath creates complex expressive typographic sculptures which he calls Stereo.types. His work echoes the free-form letter play of early decadent poets, such as Guillaume Apollinaire, the abstract dynamics of Islamic Calligraphy, and more recently interactive web-based typographic toys. Rather than sit on the flat plane, Ebon’s messages extrude into complex crystals with radial morphologies. Other works in the series take the form of mobiles where individual letters continuously move into new configurations. These works allude to an non-linear semantic structures, where forms of messages isomorphically represent shape-shifting meanings and interpretations.

This Is How We Rejoined (detail) & The Mortivores (detail) - Noella Allen

Evoking microscopic cellular biological processes such as cell division, destruction and regeneration are Neolla Allen’s process drawings which employ watercolours mixed with graphite on Mylar. Topographies of genetic transformation, DNA replication, mitosis and cellular tessellations are insinuated through the paths of watercolour dispersion. Noella also points to the inherent pattern recognition aspect to these works when viewed from a distance. For that viewpoint the sinuous forms coagulate into fossils, phantasmagoria and cannibalistic creatures.

Spotted at Moonriver.

Northern Kazakhstan ( Landsat 7) & Mayn River, Siberia ( Landsat 7)

Nasa’s Earthasart has a selection of stunning images of the Earth’s surface taken by the Landsat 7 & Terra ssatellites the later obtains pictures via its on-board ASTER remote sensor (Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer).

Both satellites scan the entire earth’s surface via a heliosynchronous orbit, an orbit that is calculated to provide a consistent illumination angle. This property is required since the satellites take remote readings via a range of bands of the electromagnetic spectrum including thermal infra-red light. They require the sun to be in consistent positions relative to the earth while tracking its surface to take accurate readings.

Not surprisingly this collection of images reveals our favourite sets of archetypal process pattern formations, geological ‘computations’ that seem familiar at any scale - from microscopic to the macroscopic.

The pictures more than hint at a possibility of Universal Computation, (that the Universe is running a giant computer program), as advocated by the likes of Stephen Wolfram & Rudy Rucker. Cellular Automata and other generative-like structures make appearances in sand dune patterns, Diffusion Aggregations systems arise to create gigantic earthworks, dendritic figures arise from river deltas. At other moments these images appear to have been taken from a atlas of pathology. These connections and similarities have been mentioned many times at this blog before, as readers will know.

Sometimes more Euclidean formats take shape. The utilitarian aspects of farming & habitation creates subdivisioning patterns like this one in Northern Kazakhstan. Subdivisioning and recursive patterns created through the process of social organisationn and agriculture have been examined in detail by enthomathamatician Ron Eglash’s in his well-known book ‘African Fractals’. Here is a related TED page including a link to a video of Ron talking about his studies.

Field-1245434420 (detail) - Toxi & 1044 - NataJenne

NataJenne’s Circles set combines recursive structures with circle packing to produce a set of compositions reminiscent of bubble aggregations, albeit with a synthetic ordering based on simple rule-sets. ‘1044′ relies on a considered choice of colours together with an algorithm that adds new circles which are aware of their predecessor’s direction (creating branching structures). Also recommended is the Mazes set where nodes and paths conspire to produce complex diagrams and schemas.

Veaone’s Experimental works09 set also shares a affinity for rarefied and subtle colour palettes. The works appear to examine an interplay between order and abstraction, gridded underlying structures break into rivlets and flows. The works have the feel of a mix between geological illustrations of earth morphologies and the exploding architectural plans of a wild style graffiti.

Toxi aka Karsten Schmidt reveals a repurposed Processing sketch orginally from 2003. Fieldlines explores ‘the beauty of tracing a simple process over time’ and as toxi adds it is ‘one of the standard design patterns in generative art’. On inspection the lines appear to demarcate invisible forcefields. Charged nodes appear to dissapate or attract energy, visualising vortices and filaments of an unseen force. A couple tags on the work reveal that Fieldlines is a visualisation of magnetic dipole phenomena.

Phyllotaxis Sphere - Eva Schindling

Eva Schindling uses a variety of computational and generative methodologies to create a range of graphic monochromatic works dealing with emergence, system theory, and the computational modelling of nature.

In Liquid Sound Collision Eva has produced a 3D print from a data interpretation of sound waves colliding, the resultant turbulent form instructs us to consider the invisible process of pressure being transmitted through a gas, as audio meets audio head on.

Her Reaction Diffusion sketch is a of marriage of Op-Art and Biology. Organic black and white patterns, Moire effects, convolutions and distortions are created with smooth linear transitions. The works utilise well know models to compute swirling pattern formations, The Belousov-Zhabotinsky Reaction as well as Reaction Diffusion Equations.

Eva’s Flickr sets of works, sketches and notes can be found here

Varietal Urbanus Female - Choe U Ram & Rule 30 - Kristoffer Myskja

Microblogging: Selected Tweets, during May, from my Twitter stream.

Marvellous myriad of experimental scores and anarchic aphorisms on musical notation. Notations - John Cage (PDF) at Ubu.

‘Images du monde visionnaire’, cut-up of patterns & textures from explorer of inner territories, Henri Michaux also at Ubu.

Art machines form Kristoffer Myskja, particularly wonderful is the one for generating a rule 30 Cellular Automata.

Magnetic termites construct mounds according to fixed, genetically inherited axes via passed down DNA blueprints at Environmentalgraffiti.

Binary cross-stitch for Alan Turing. Literal translations of titles to stitched binary – Cody Trepte.

The secret life of geophysical magnetism. Semi-fictional animated visualisations from Semiconductor.

Varietal Urbanus Female and other miraculous mechanical anima from Choe U Ram.

Stan Vanderbeek – Symmetrics (1972) Hypnotic geometric modulations.

Elegant Harmongraphic glyphs at Subblue.

Patabotany, Pataecology & Patabotanical Morphology via Foam. Alfred Jarry meets Biololgy.

Tetris Effect - Playing Tetris for a long durations can cause hypnogogic and spatial ‘flashbacks’.

Pigmentation of seashells reveals insights into neural network interaction at SeedMagazine.

South London flat transformed into a gemstone cavern - Roger Hiorn.

Venn Project #21 – Frank C - Harmonograph x3 y5 s1 – Subblue

10 ways of drawing music. Experiments in music notation from some of the 20th Century’s finest composers. Exhibition, New Langton Arts, San Francisco.

Rhythm 23 (1923) - Hans Richter. Abstract geometric cinema from 1923.

Self-portraits derived from MRI & CAT scan data - Angela Palmer.

Blinkity Blank - Norman McLaren. Animated syneasthetic Ideograms.

Flickr Venn Mastery from Frank C.

Live AV environments by Modulate

Kinetic solar system mobiles from Daniel Chadwick

Moebius Music Box - Ranjit Bhatnagar & Atari-400-synthesizer - Paul Rothman

The excellent Synthgear blog doesn’t restrict itself to waxing over the latest modular synth modules but also has some nice articles on fringe aspects of musicality and sound generation. Take for example its posts on audio waveform jewelry, sound generating fish, or a very gorgeous Atari 400 mod.

It also points to a project by Ranjit Bhatnagar, the Moebius Music Box, an automatic music machine whose perforated roll exists upon our favourite paradoxical topological surface. The Moebius Strip as you know has some curious properties. A line drawn along the middle of the strip will meet back up with itself but at the “other side” and will be double the length of the original strip of paper. This single continuous curve demonstrates that the Moebius strip has only one surface.

Ranjit points out that ‘What you end up with is a tune that is played upside-down and backwards, and then just backwards, and then upside-down and backwards again. Over and over, forever’

One must resist attempting to imagine in an Hofstadter-esque manner what if the score played a version of Bach’s Endlessly Rising Canon, and more so why didn’t Escher incorporate this notion in his own Mobeius Strip drawings? A complete explanation of the interplay between exotic topology, ants and fugues is beyond the boundaries of this post, so we direct the reader, of course, to Douglas Hofstadter’s ‘Godel Escher, Bach’.

Ranjit Bhatnagar’s Moebius Music Box was constructed in a day as part of his Instrument-a-day project, a Flickr set of pictures of his ingenious audio contraptions can be found here.

ComplexCity (details) - Lee Jang Sub

Picking up on the inherent similarity between transportation systems in cities and the morphology of leaves and trees, is Lee Jang Sub’s ComplexCity series of works. These elaborate mappings of roads and highways mimic the venation patterns in leaves and the rhizomatic configurations of tree branches, creating delicate organic filigree structures in a range of different mediums, including light.

‘This project is an exploration to find a concealed aesthetic by using the pattern formed by the roads of the city which have been growing and evolving randomly through time, thus composing the complex configuration we experience today.
I perceive the city’s patterns as living creatures that I recompose to form an urban image’ - Lee Jang Sub

Spinning Box & Spinning Shaft - Alejandro and Moira Sina

Some particularly radiant and luminous offerings come in the form of a variety of lightworks from Alejandro and Moira Sina. The couple’s work combine innovation in technique using high frequency electronics with gas as well as expertise in the architectural domain. The resultant works range from interactive installations to works in museum spaces, as well as kinetic sculptures and mobiles. The geometric arrangements, alignments and abstractions of linear forms sometimes recall the animations of Oscar Fischinger - in both cases bright saturated neons dominate the colour palette. The kinetic and mobile works comprise of moving prismatic structures, perfect vehicles to configure the electromagnetic spectrum combinatorially and generate overlapping and interfering light transformations.