Sunday, October 24, 2010

Pure Data

Alex, I think you probably know about this already. But you really should if you don't, because it might be a useful addition to your musical work-flow:

Pure Data is a visual programming environment for (mainly) sound and music. It was the musical back-end to Spore. Visual programming, in itself, is really fascinating, but I've found it's never quite practical. The patch cable is the metaphor to which it seems best suited. Blender also utilizes the node-and-noodle processing scheme quite a lot, mainly for post-processing of rendered frames, but also for texture synthesis, and, experimentally, for parametric meshes. I first heard about Pure Data watching this python talk.

Below is the talking piano...

Ruminations on Brazil

A couple weeks ago, Thomas Gideon, of the Command Line Podcast, posted a thoughtful appreciation of Terry Gilliam's movie, from a programmer's point-of-view. -> Link.

Tuesday, October 12, 2010

Minecraft + Art Student = SUPERTRAIN



On BOINGBOING there are some other links to Minecraft and its creator as well. Just follow the link in the title of this post.

Sunday, October 10, 2010

A Tarrasque


... by American artist Leonard Baskin. It's not too often I run across an image of the Tarrasque, so I thought I'd post it. Baskin's drawings have the mixture of Expressionism and Surrealism that are also the seeds of the art of DeKooning, Gorky and Pollock. Another lesser known American Expressionist is Theodore Roszak, who was a Chicagoan, and whose cthonic sculpture below is dedicated to Louis Sullivan.

The Tarrasque image is from A Book of Dragons by Hosie and Leonard Baskin, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1985.
The Roszak sculpture is in the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC.