randform

While looking for the classic russian winter animation ded maros i lyeto (santa claus and the summer) from 1969 by soyusmultfilm I stumbled on youtube over this jewel for all lovers of ascii animation made at the “department of educational and scientific fotography and cinematography” at the Lomonossov university (N. Konstantinov, V. Minakhin, V. Ponomarenko, A. Skuridin, V. Shurkin). In the comment section it was said that the animation is from 1967, which I unfortunately couldn’t verify.

(more…)

Some weakend impressions from winterly Erholungspark Marzahn. As you can see it is quite icy.*

*thanks to Mark Aufpasser for tips for the camera!

update 27.2.2016:
Its been about ten years since this entry had been written. Meanwhile Erholungspark Marzahn
had turned into a kind of ugly Disney park like companion piece. I have basically ceased to go there.

(more…)

image source
Peter Kutchukian, a current graduate student in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard, has started a new nanotechnology-related art/gallery site, www.nanohedron.com: “Nanohedron aims to exhibit scientific images, with a focus on images depicting nanoscale objects. The work ranges from EM images of nanoscale materials to graphical renderings of molecules. Scientific images lying outside the realm of nanoscience such as algorithmic art will also be considered.”

via somewhereville

Scientific visualization from the past: In 1660 Andreas Cellarius published his Harmonia Macrocosmica. A beautifully illustrated star atlas. Here are nice scans of the plates while here and here are online browsable scans of the book. via the cartoonist

A small update to nad’s post on indra’s pearls: Jürgen Richter-Gebert has made an interactive course (german only) with his dynamic geometry program Cinderella. Now you can easily experiment with those circles and iterated function systems yourself.

It seems to be a London week here at randform.
sensity is an audio-visual artwork that lets you hear and see data collected by wireless sensors around in London.

This post is a follow up post to some posts (1,2,3) relating to the question of simulation. It is concerned with the question of how “real” a simulation can “feel”.
(more…)

Since I don’t have a mobile phone blogging tool or even a laptop I couldn’t life blog from the NMI conference at the academy of sciences. So here comes a little summary about the topics and speakers of last Wednesday.

(more…)

Not the newest news, but still noteworthy – the demo “debris” by Farbrausch, which was the winner of the demoparty breakpoint in April. The demo is a windows executable of 177 kByte! The trailer reminds a bit of sometimes and sometimes of float and Kapitaal.

A video of the demo can be found on youtube

As promised they have made the tool for generating the procedural textures available now: it ist called .werkkzeug 3 TE (while the tool is free, the texture generation library needs to be purchased).

manicone is online now. The coloring of manicone took more time than expected. The coloring made it necessary to consider theories and examples of artistic color compositions, physical mixing properties, technological limitations (calibrations) and infoesthetic basics (For a glimpse onto the problem of coloring and infoesthetics see e.g. this video lecture by tamara munzner (who was a visiting scientist of the TU math department in the mid nineties) or the review on pingmag.

It is a difficult question to find the right portion between colorful and colorful. Colors may be shouting. If they unfriendly shout you down then this is not acceptable. If the are too faint and disappear among the other colors then this is not acceptable either. Due to the transparency properties of manicone, color mixing was likewise an important question.