November 24th, 2006
Posted in Blather | Comments Off
November 24th, 2006
Unfortunately I don’t have much to relate at the moment having had my head stuck in my computer generating images lately. Other than the interview I had with ABC TV yesterday that will be screened some time in July 2007 as part of a larger arts-science show…
Keep in mind that the first three are constructed using only 2D images of pollen, diatoms and other microscopic things photographed under the microscope. Some of the pollen is from the Galapagos, sampled from material taken in a recent coring trip. The final image is an experiment that led to the second image. Both of these are based on photographs of people’s heads.
So images then:
Posted in Computer Art | No Comments »
November 24th, 2006
I have been steadily working away preparing for a one night only show of some initial outcomes from my residency at Archaeology and Natural History. Here’s the flyer for the event, to be held next Wednesday the 29th November at 7pm at the Front Gallery in Lyneham:
Posted in Blather | No Comments »
November 7th, 2006
I know I said I wasn’t too keen on fractals, but while trawling the web I came across a couple on interesting variants… The first is an illustration by visual artist Alex Noriega who takes a very relaxed and drowsy approach to fractals:
The other is this widely featured but nonetheless charming Romanesco Cauliflower. I have a penchant for relating things back to food.
Posted in Blather | No Comments »
November 7th, 2006
Another exponent of natural forms employed in art alongside Ernst Haeckel is Karl Blossfeldt (1825-1932). To quote from the blurb of the book “Art Forms in Nature” (Schirmer Art Books):
Karl Blossfeldt first published his photographs of plants in 1928, achieving overnight fame. (…) By manifoldly enlarging the inner structures of plants, Blossfeldt was able to reveal their organic form (…) Karl Blossfeldt was neither a trained photographer nor a botanist. He was a sculptor who, as a professor of art, was interested in plants for didactic reasons.
Wikipedia describes Blosfeldt’s work as being “a transition between looking at photography as just science and looking at photography as art as well.” A similar phenomenon can been seen as the public conception of computers as “tools for science” adjusts to incorporate computers as “tools for art”.
Posted in Research, Art/Science | No Comments »
November 6th, 2006
I found a bug in the code I was running to generate superformula-based images which was why some of my output was weird. I’m on track now, and these are the kind of organic forms I’m generating:
Posted in Geometry and Math, Computer Art | No Comments »
October 30th, 2006
On friday I booked in for my first use of the Scanning Electron Microscope over at the Research School for Biological Sciences (RSBS). Incidentally, ANU is full of acronyms (is that tautologous?), such as BOZO (School of Botany and Zoology) and RSPAS (Research School for Pacific and Asian Studies) to mention a couple.
Cheng Huang is one of the SEM staff, a operator of the arcane instruments housed in that laboratory. He inducted me to the lab (required various safety briefings such as the location of the emergency shower and emergency eye-wash should I burn myself with various chemicals used in the preparation of SEM samples) before coating the samples I had brought with me (and stuck on metal pellets using double sided tape) with gold. The gold works to make the sample conductive - a required step for SEM viewing.
The gold coating process involves a vacuum chamber filled with argon gas called a “sputter coater”. The sputter coater uses argon gas and a small electric field. The sample is placed in a small chamber which is at vacuum. Argon gas is then introduced and an electric field is used to ionise the argon atoms . The Argon ions are then attracted to a negatively charged piece of gold foil. The ions buzz around knocking gold atoms from the surface of the foil which then settle onto the surface of the sample, producing a gold coating.
The samples I used were mostly from my own body - a piece of hair, some skin off the tips of my fingers and a nail clipping. I didn’t get to view them all in time and haven’t collected my photos, but here’s an SEM picture of the hair on a mosquito:
Posted in Field Trips | No Comments »
October 30th, 2006
Jonathan from my previous post led me on a whilrwind our of the ANU Supercomputing Facility late last week. So far during my stay at ANU I’ve seen array of bugs, arrays of plants, and now it was time to be subjected to a massive array of computers. I saw arrays of computers for parallel computing, arrays of PC’s for single threaded computing and even the computers hosting the Universities mail servers. In the computer room was also a robot controlled data storage silo (not pictured), where a robot arm spun around a huge cylinder retrieving data from hundreds (thousands?) of digital storage tapes on demand. The Australasian Pollen and Spore Atlas being created at Paleoworks in my department are employing some folks from Supercomputing to handle their database requirements, or so I’m told.
Posted in Field Trips | No Comments »
October 30th, 2006
Last week I met up with Jonathan McCabe an artist and engineer who works at the ANU Supercomputer Facility who in his spare time writes computer programs that generate abstract images and patterns. McCabe describes his work as writing computer programs which measure statistical properties of images for use in artificial evolution of computer art. He employs various algorithmic techniques to generate his images, and this latest one below (a segment of the original, larger image) he described as being created
by iteratively convolving the image with a radially symmetrical function then theshholding it. In a way it is like a neural network model with each pixel getting a weighted sum of the values of the pixels around it then a step function, or like a cellular automata with a large neighbourhood.
Complicated sounding but the effect is striking:
Posted in Computer Art | No Comments »
October 25th, 2006
I finally got around to editing some of the pollen images I’ve been looking at under the light microscope. These are all taken from the Galapagos pollen reference collection which is a subset of slides of fresh pollen from the pollen reference collection (as opposed to fossilised pollen) that is used to help identify and compare older pollen found in peat bog cores. I’ll be using fossilised pollen in my work, but for this purpose the newer pollen is better preserved structurally giving a better impression of its shape and features. One of the shapes here is not pollen, but I’ll leave it to the budding palynologists to guess which.
Posted in Research, Processing | No Comments »