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.