A long title for a long picture

I finally got all my printed-out panels mounted to foamcore and stuck to the wall, via a precarious arrangement of magnets. A number of them got dinged up during the process of figuring out how to get them to stick properly, but this isn't a huge problem because I've been thinking of this installation more or less as a maquette.

It would be fun to use the large-format printer to make an even bigger version, mounted on wood or something reasonably permanent, instead of foamcore. Of course, then I'd have to figure out yet another different system of attachment, since the magnets wouldn't hold the additional weight. So it goes.

A Medieval Conception of the History & Development of the Cosmos



Twelve panels, inkjet print on photo paper, 8 inches high by 10 feet long.

I seem to be making a theme of these long, narrow, hallway-running printed things. There was that scrolling map thing I made in my sophomore year, and the tangram sequence at my BFA show, and now this silly fractal. I suppose they all have a sort of vague narrative-sequence effect, which means they're somewhat related to my interest in books. The fractal, if read from left to right, ends with a minibrot.

The photograph doesn't show it very well, of course, so here's a link to a digital version, 500 pixels high and 7500 wide.

The first one-third

Here are a couple of absolutely terrible photographs of the multi-panel thing I'm working on. I wouldn't post them at all, but I know Chronographia will be checking to see if I'm keeping up with NaNaHeyHey.



The prints have been mounted on black foamcore, and precariously balanced on magnets stuck to thumbtacks. I was fairly surprised that I got them to stay up long enough to take the picture.



When the whole thing is done, there will be twelve panels, for a total of ten running feet. I'm still not sure how I'm going to do the actual attaching-to-the-wall part. It will probably involve more magnets, stuck to the back of the foamcore somehow.

Now with more bells & whistles

Ooh, I've got more of it working. Now I can try things like this:

untitled [angle to dots]



Or this:

untitled [antique buttons]



Ha ha ha ha wheeeeee!

Pretzels and other loopy knots

I do this every summer. After a couple of weeks of post-school decompression, I drag out the couple of coloring algorithms I've been bashing at for the last several years, and get them a little closer to what I want. This year, the process is complicated (and also simplified) by the new object-oriented systems in UF5.

My biggest difficulty is that I am not in any sense a programmer; I've worked with fractal colorings enough to understand the logic in a sort of abstract way, and I know exactly what behaviors and effects I'd like to make possible, but there are huge categories of basic programming experience that I don't have, and so sometimes the answer to "Why isn't this doing what I think it should?" is "Because it doesn't work that way, you dope. This is where the semicolon goes!"

So I take apart bits of code that other people have written, and try to see what's going on inside them, and I also pester anyone around me who I even vaguely suspect of knowing how to write code, and I make slow progress. With a substantial amount of help from the Professor (my constant—though sometimes reluctant—ally), I was able to get a basic plug-in working in less than a day. Adding some of the more complicated bells and whistles turns out to be fiddly, and in the meantime I've also figured out some ways of improving the old-school non-object-oriented version. So now I have two different coloring methods that each do about seventy-five percent of what I want, but not the same seventy-five percent.

It's nice when there are brief glimmers of illumination.

Wire Lanterns





But mostly it just ties my brain in knots like little pretzels.

Pretzel Logic

De-Rezzed

Hooray, I've got my gallery pages into enough shape that I think they'll do for a bit. I'm hoping to get some more stuff added before I go back to school, but at least there's something there now.

This morning I was thinking about how to make pictures that looked like they'd been Photoshop-filtered, but could be rendered at high resolution, for printing. I did some experiments, and was going to post about them here, but it turned into quite a long-winded thing with a lot of pictures, so I made a separate page for it. So now the world can read all about my filter forgery.

I started with this fractal:

A New Era


And mangled it half a dozen different ways. Are any of them any better than the original? I have no idea; I've been staring at them all for way too long, and have lost all sense of aesthetic judgment. I do think it's kind of entertaining that typing up my notes on the process seems to have taken at least twice as long as it took to make the experiments in the first place.

Extreme low resolution

This is an experimental thing I did this afternoon. It worked well enough that I think I will try to do a larger one, with a more interesting design, as part of my printmaking project for this semester.

untitled (not there yet)



Reductive woodcut printed with water-based inks in five colors, 4-1/2"x3". A simple Mandelbrot zoom with iteration banding.