The bottom row is a stereoscopic anaglyph (arguably a redundancy), just in case you have any red/blue glasses about your person.

Somekindeous vineyflowerous, growing outside our front door. Over the past month or so, this vine has produced over one hundred blooms.

deep space II (aec). Originally uploaded to flickr by magrolino.

There is another photo here of 2005.1.

“[They] were incredibly small, nay so small, in my sight, that I judged that even if 100 of these very wee animals lay stretched out one against another, they could not reach to the length of a grain of coarse Sand.”

— Antonie van Leeuwenhoek describing his discovery of bacteria

See illustrations and reproductions of van Leeuwenhoek’s microscope here.

They said they'd come back for me if I said anything more.

[Via Coudal Partners]

Here is 2003.1a and a detail from that print work:

2003.1a, limited variant edition print, 2003, Kenneth A. Huff.

Detail from 2003.1a, limited variant edition print, 2003, Kenneth A. Huff.

And here are some still frames from the animated work, 2007.2a (you can see short excerpts from the piece here and here):

Still frame from 2007.2a, seamlessly-looping high-definition animation, 12 minutes, 2007, Kenneth A. Huff.

Still frame from 2007.2a, seamlessly-looping high-definition animation, 12 minutes, 2007, Kenneth A. Huff.

Still frame from 2007.2a, seamlessly-looping high-definition animation, 12 minutes, 2007, Kenneth A. Huff.

The lecture will be at 12:30 p.m. on Monday, 26 January 2009 in the Jepson Center Auditorium. I will be presenting my body of work, focusing on the inspiration and ideas behind the work, with particular emphasis on the two series of works represented by the two pieces above.

While the festival ends on 31 January, the museum currently is scheduled to continue showing my print and animation throughout 2009.

[Personal aside: I am particularly excited to see tonight’s performance by Ben Neill and LEMUR (League of Electronic Musical Robots).]

The Ars Electronica center is one of the longest-established centers for new media art, celebrating its thirtieth anniversary this year. On 2 January 2009, they celebrated the grand opening of a new building and the start of Linz’s year as the European Union Cultural Capital.

In the Center’s new building, Deep Space is a dedicated projection gallery with the capacity to show 4K (3840 by 2160 pixels), stereoscopic, 16 meter by 9 meter projections simultaneously on the wall and floor! With my still images, visitors will be able to zoom in on the full detail of the works, allowing them to explore the works in a way that until now was only possible in my studio. Very exciting.

Through fortuitous circumstance, I was in Linz for a site visit on the day the Deep Space projectors were turned on for the first time and my pieces were the first images to be projected in the space.

Here I am standing in front of a portion of EPF:2003:V:B:5::383(25) with a silly happy grin.

Here is my partner, Sean, acting as human scale in the space and standing in front of a projection of my time-based work, 2007.3. The horizontal red laser line is for projector alignment. Four projectors are being used for the wall and another four for the floor (one of the projectors shut down with in a few minutes of starting up). The bright horizontal and vertical bands are the projector overlaps that had yet to be blended away in the installation. (All of this is from early December, when the new building still was very-much-under-construction.)

In addition to the still images being shown, I prepared site-specific versions of 2006.7 and 2007.3 to be shown in the space. The two time-based works were recreated to take full advantage of the 4K cinematic projectors. Below are reduced stills from 2006.7 (Deep Space) and 2007.3 (Deep Space).

Additional events incorporating my work are being planned throughout the year, including during the Center’s annual Ars Electronica Festival, 3–8 September 2009. I will post details here and on my Events page as soon as they are available.

Links:

Kenneth A. Huff: Selections from Ôr’ganik Constructions in Deep Space

Deep Space

Ars Electronica Center

Ars Electronica Festival

Dave Johnson’s blog has very good material regarding mental ray, character technical direction and MEL:

http://www.djx.com.au/blog/

Zap Andersson is an engineer with mental images who worked on the fast skin material. His blog is a great resource for mental ray information:

http://mentalraytips.blogspot.com/

The Los Angeles mental ray User Group has all sorts of mentral ray-related goodies:

http://www.lamrug.org/

mymentalray.com is a growing resource for the mental ray community:

http://www.mymentalray.com/

A personal favorite is the page explaining sampling in mental ray, a good thing to understand for high-quality and efficient renderings:

http://www.lamrug.org/resources/samplestips.html

Eric Pavey’s MEL Wiki is an excellent aggregation of information for Maya’s built-in scripting language, MEL:

http://mayamel.tiddlyspot.com/

There’s always Duncan Brinsmead’s blog…recently showing some fun with Maya’s nCloth for non-cloth simulations:

http://area.autodesk.com/index.php/blogs_duncan/blog_list/

Here is a very good Maya Wiki:

http://www.tokeru.com/t

I will update this post as things change or as I come across additional resource.

Above, Sean is drawing one of Michelangelo’s Slaves in the Musée du Louvre.

Rather than duplicate our efforts, we decided to post everything on Sean’s blog: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4. The post are heavy with photos and heavier with silliness.

…more soon…

The book is Processing: A Programming Handbook for Visual Designers and Artists by Casey Reas and Ben Fry. The fun part is that I did not know that I was mentioned in the book. I had purchased it as reference for a programming class I teach and stumbled upon my name weeks later.

I am a long-time fan of both Mr. Reas’s and Mr. Fry’s work. Their efforts to develop the Processing programming language and their individual works are inspiring (example and example). In the book, Mr. Reas writes a bit about my print-based work and the inspiration behind it.

In other book news, Aesthetic Computing has gone paperback:

I created the cover artwork for the book and wrote a chapter about my Encoding with Prime Factors series. (There is some information on the series and process here and some example works are shown here.)

When in New York recently, I also noticed on the bookshelves that Bruce Wand’s Art in the Digital Age is available in softcover. A number of my pieces appear in the book.

In unrelated reference photography, here are a couple of details from buckeye seeds and seed pods:

Back to preparations for Saturday’s installation…

A few months ago, I found some of these:

On my early morning walk a few days ago, I found another and decided to adopt it.

I was remembering again my favorite biology teacher and thinking to myself, “Self, what is this caterpillar going to become?” So I brought it home, placed it in a jar with a shoot of bamboo (for structure), a sprig of basil (for sustenance) and a wisteria seed pod (for transportation). I thought I would take some photos of the current specimen, but it turns out it was shy, and by the afternoon, it had wrapped itself in the leaves. So now I have this:

A wonderful structural detail:

From the archives, a mug shot (or a tail shot, it’s hard to tell):

I love these feet:

That’s all. Well, okay, one more of those wonderful feet:

So, after I found my caterpillar and decided to adopt, I had to carry it back home. I placed it on a leaf and went on my way, only to pass three or four people walking their dogs. Some people walk their dog, I walk my caterpillar. You know, ’cause that’s what you do when you have a caterpillar.

I am not going walk the cocoon…that would be weird.

Stay tuned…

A few weeks ago, this moth caught my eye in our garden. I grabbed my camera and stealthily took pictures of my newly-found subject. Well, I thought I was stealthy. After a few minutes, I wanted to see if I could coax the moth to change position (“Turn a bit more toward the light please and chin up.”) only to find that it was dead. Now it is part of my collection of curiosities and a permanent point of inspiration.

One of the things I love about macro photography is that I end up being able to see things in the captured image that I cannot see with my naked eyeballs. Case in point:

Luscious. If there are any lepidopterists reading this, I would be grateful to know the species of my furry find.

There are six screens, in L-shaped pairs (two screens are obscured from view). The time-based works shown, from left to right, are 2007.3, 2007.6.3 and 2007.4. (These all are very recent works that have not made it onto my web site.) Also on display are fourteen print works:

Shown here are 2001.1, 2003.1a, 2003.2d, 2004.2c and 2000.16b.

As an overarching theme for much of my time-based work, I have been working with the ancient elements. Many ancient philosophies looked to a small group of archetypal elements as a framework for understanding the physical world, explaining patterns and substance in nature. Currently, I am working with the four ancient elements common to Buddhist, Greek and Hindu philosophies — earth, air, fire and water. Here are sample frames from the fire time-based works shown last night:

2007.3, animation, seamless loop; 2007; 1 hour, 20 minutes, high definition (1080 x 1920, 30 fps).

2007.6.3, animation, seamless loop (work in progress); 2007; 2 channels; 1 minute, 15 seconds each; high definition (1080 x 1920, 30 fps).

2007.4, animation, seamless loop (work in progress); 2007; 7 minutes, high definition (1080 x 1920, 30 fps).

The installation also will be in place for the closing party on Saturday, 1 November. Just to keep it interesting, I will be switching out all of the projections…

The New Jersey School of Architecture at NJIT has invited me to present my work as part of their Fall 2008 Lecture Series. I will be giving a broad overview of my body of work, as well as the intent and inspiration behind the work.

The event takes place in Weston Lecture Hall 1.

Here are some early morning reference photographs I took today of elements found in the overgrown empty lot next door.

Take care,

— Ken

This 1869 photograph by John Thomson is from the collection of the Wellcome Library in London. A Manchu man and girl are taking in a traveling peep show. The photo was taken in Peking, Pechili Province, China (when it was still Peking).

The Wellcome collection is another treasure trove of images that I only have begun to explore…

Enjoy.

— Ken

“Next questions is, who’s got balls enough to get it up there.”

“I can do it right or left, it don’t matter to me.”

“I don’t want any one gettin’ hurt, especially on the head.”

A: “If that falls on me, I’m gonna hit you upside the head.”
B: “If it falls on you, you ain’t gonna be able to.”

A: “You were looking up my skirt. Tell the truth.”
B: “I had my eyes closed.”
A: “You were looking up my skirt.”

I don’t spend my day eavesdropping, really, I don’t.

—Ken