Axe Cop

Rediscover your inner hyper-active five year old . . .

Axe Cop knew that they would need to chase the Boss to Zombie World.

"We are going to need to change Wexter into a dragon so that he can fly us to Zombie World."

"But he is already a giant lizard that can fly."

"To get to Zombie World you need a dragon with rocket wings. Plus, dragons are awesome."

This web comic was created by a five year old and his 29 year old brother.

Flowspace- Interactive Swarm

Also a curious show about mapping that i probably won't get to see because its in new york
http://www.bitforms.com/current.html#id=144&num=1

Humble Indie Bundle 2

Five games. Pay what you want. You can't lose.
The bundle is available for this week only.

Ghost Diagrams

If you click the 'random' button of this tile assembler repeatedly, you will be rewarded with moments of unique beauty. (Link.) I was pleasantly surprised to find out that its author also wrote the "Resynthesizer" texture synthesis script for the GIMP, which I've found tremendously useful in the past.

Also, this is fun to scribble on.

Pachinko and forgetting

This poetic film-excerpt about pachinko parlors reminds me of one of my favorite films, Sans Soleil. I have not seen the documentary this is from. I believe I might need to travel to Japan to be a kogichi for several years in order to master my art. Link. Via.
Also: This tour of Tokyo's electronics shops circulated a month or two ago. I found it really fascinating.

Meshes in Art History

A few of the more analytic artists of the Renaissance sometimes modeled with geometric meshes. Coincidentally, this is one of the fundamental techniques of computer graphics. Its appearance in the Renaissance shows a playful reductionism at work.

Here is a rudimentary primer on the concepts of mesh modeling. The challenge of this technique is managing your edge loops and poles.

Albrecht Durer
Paulo Uccello

Much of Paulo Uccello's work is bound up in the technical demonstration of mechanical perspective. This was before the technique of perspective became ossified and pedantic. A checkered torus sometimes appears in his murals and drawings as a show of technical mastery. They look like invaders from another plane of reality.

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.

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.

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.