randform

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Vlad Alexeev had created a website called Impossible World which collects “impossible figures”, from Vlad Alexeev’s website:

Since some time I became interested in such artworks and figures that look usual at a first sight, but there is something wrong with them if you look at them more attentively. For me, the most interesting such figures are “impossible figures” which make an impression that they cannot exist in a real world.

I wanted to know more and tried to find some information about these figures in the Internet. I found numerous sites containing three or four different impossible figures, but there was no site devoted exclusively to the study of impossible figures. During this pursuit I made the acquaintance of impossible figures of Swedish artist Oscar Reutersvärd and images of Dutch artist M.C. Escher.

little artwork in between, video: “herfortragendes abtragen im untertagungsbau”

math comment: the involved tranformations are not using Moebius transformations like in In2, but are similar to those used in Leiden.

graphics looking as from cellular automata (game of life?) and fluids in a psychadelic 1970 animation by Schwartz and Knowlton.
via dataisnoture

For the upcoming weekend a youtube link to a very dark but brilliantly made animation called “Fallen Art” from 2004 by Tomasz Bagiński

-> youtube link

via slupczynski-vs-mickiewicz

“2 D blacklight transparency beween 3-D house sequences” artwork by Angela Travis

A short remark: If I should not answer a comment to this blog then the reason for this is definitely not because I want to be unpolite, but because among others I am currently very busy. Sometimes it just may take a while, because some things have to be found out first, like for the case of this comment by a randform reader called H. Düppel, who was complaining that I am doing marketing for a commercial software called Poser.
This blog here receives no payments from any place, on the contrary it costs me actually quite a bit, so if I should talk about a commercial product over here then this is for no marketing reason, but out of a pure personal interest. Moreover I actually rather prefer not to talk too much about commercial things, because I dont like to be part of a marketing campaign, but as said I am not dogmatic about this. So here – so to say as a balance to my previous link to the software poser..:)..a link to the open source software make human, which seems to implement (or is going to implement) the same or better features as Poser.

randform wishes a happy new year to everybody!

just be careful – in particular given the rather bleak economic outlooks it will get even more easy to loose oneself in dreamworlds, so I wouldn’t wonder if the boom of the game industry is going to continue. In this TED video (via serious games) David Perry describes the evolution of video games, however of special interest in this video may be an -what he calls opinion of a student- which is a (realistic?) documentary about a self acclaimed video game addict (second part of the talk, the whole talk is about 20 min). The documentary describes the cognitive changes which are due to excessive video gaming.

spaceborne apes is a music project of Niko Lai and this is a new song and video:
“Urban State Of Mind” (music, lyrics, and animation by Niko Lai).
enjoy.

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.

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The above is a little applet from Tim and me, illustrating the associated family which interpolates between helicoid and catenoid. If you move the slider you can observe the interpolation. You can rotate the surface by dragging. Both geometric figures (and all interpolations in between) are socalled minimal surfaces, which means that they have mean curvature zero.

The applet was inspired by the fact that clowns usually wear red spheres on their nose, which are surfaces with constant positive mean curvature. We wondered how a variation of this kind of comic circus fashion may look like.

related:
-> the helical keyboard – a piano in a helicoidal shape (at least thats what i understood from the website) …where I indeed somewhat have the suspect that one could break ones hands if one would play on it for real.