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.

Minecraft = Blockland + (The Shield Lands ÷ 3)

They've almost figured out what we've known for years...

Autodesk to users: "Screw you!"

If you read any EULA for a "industry standard" proprietary software package, that's what every sentence is, but in legalese. I feel somewhat dirty for being with Autodesk on this one, but I am. Either a license agreement is contractually binding or it is not. The GPL relies on the same legal mechanics. That's why it's brilliant, because it liberates users with the means that were developed to exploit them. (Link.)

Evolution is great!

What's happening in the photograph is wickedly awesome. Zuggtmoy would be very proud. Read about it.

Pixel art landscapes

This is a set of landscapes by an artist who did all the background work for two of my favorite PC games from my youth: Loom and The Secret of Monkey Island. This set of pictures utilizes the runtime palette manipulations Activision used to make their dazzling Atari 2600 games. They are also HTML5 demos (and will therefore not work in Microsoft's web browser).
(Link.) (Via.) (Some explanation.)