…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

The web site for the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter currently has 6,137 high-resolution images of the Martian surface available for exploration. According to the Planetary Data System (did you know we had one of those?), HiRISE has released over 26 terabytes of data. The images below are from some of the observations taking place between 20 March and 24 April 2008.

To say that this is a small sampling is an understatement of planetary proportions. These snippets are from the June release of images and I only have looked at the first twenty-three of fifty pages.

Below, they were looking for “change due to mass wasting on scarps of different slopes”. I didn’t know what a scarp was before today, even though I have seen them (here on Earth).

Did you know that a barchan was a crescent-shaped dune? One of the things I love about the HiRISE pages is that many have very detailed descriptions. Click though on the image below for more information on the barchan and, I am guessing, its smaller relatives, the barchanoids.

Update/correction: Turns out that a barchnoid is not the smaller relative of a barchan, but rather is a transitional form between barchans and dunes…the nuances that come from specializations. “The transition is much more gradual…from barchans to barchanoids, to barchanoids with increasing slipface lengths, to dunes with barchanoid characteristics like crescentic slipfaces and tails, to dunes with irregular slipfaces, to more or less two-dimensional dunes.” [Source] Also, there is an article on the geology of sand dunes by John Mangimeli that has some nice illustrations.

Each of the images above is linked directly to its HiRISE page where you can find specific information about the observation and download various versions of the data. I gravitate to the RGB color, non-mapped versions, as shown here.

As a technical note, many of the images are stored in the JPEG2000 format and are very high resolution. During my time lost in the Library of Congress earlier in the week, I came across LizardTech’s ExpressView browser plug-in/viewing application. It handles both MrSID and JPEG2000 files. The plug-in and application come in the same download (as least for Mac OS X).

For a final bit of perspective, an observation from 3 October 2007:

That’s our home and our moon seen from the orbit of another planet.

Enjoy.

— Ken

Source for all images: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona HiRISE

Back in the fifth grade, I had a wonderful biology teacher, Mrs. Bosert. I have very distinct memories of staying after class to look through the microscopes at squiggly little creatures zipping across the field of view.

A few years ago, I came across two sites with deep collections of Victorian-era prepared microscope slides. Individually, each slide has its own interesting elements — specimens, labels, nomenclature, &c. As a group, they are a fascinating and beautiful slice of the history of science and discovery.

Sources: Darwin Country’s Microscopes and Microscopy and The Manchester Microscopical Society Slide Collection

While I have shown fifteen, between the two sites there are well over five hundred slides to peruse.

Enjoy.

— Ken

P.S. I would love to see them as larger images also. The subject of “Victorian microscope slides”is now entered on the standing research list.

Another day of Bang! Bang! (Choice contractor quotes to come…)

I found these beautiful photographs of soap bubbles by Jason Tozer. Click on the image above to jump into the Flickr group.

Mr. Tozer’s site is here.

Enjoy.

— Ken

While the destruction continues on the courtyard wall, I am finding it difficult to do anything constructive. Bang! Bang! Pound! Pound! Crash! Crash! A bit distracting.

To mentally escape, I have lost myself in the Library of Congress’s “An American Time Capsule”. Somewhere in this virtual pile of 17,000 scanned pieces of printed ephemera, I found The Cryptograph, complete with instructions. This, of course, ties right into my childhood ambition to be a spy or a detective (in the tradition of Sherlock Holmes or Lord Peter Wimsey).

Back to the archives…

[“Zf” is the key, just to keep it easy.]

Odux Adpx,

— Uxz

…when I woke up, there was a hole in our wall!

Okay, I am being dramatic. I didn’t sleep through a hole being knocked in our building. I did nap through some of it. My napping abilities border on narcoleptic.

[Overheard, from one of the contractors:
“That Martha Stewart hammer you got ain’t gonna do it.”]

We are knocking a hole from the inside to the outside courtyard. When I write “we”, I mean that the contractors are knocking a hole in the wall. I am watching and covering my ears.

Sean is keeping a more detailed, brick-by-brick account…

Take care,

— Ken

While I have maintained a blog-ish News section for more than ten years, I recently decided that I wanted to jump on the great blogging band wagon. It is a wonderful format for posting news, but also for sharing the creative process, technical information and a selection of things that inspire.

No promises regarding frequency of updates, content, etc. I will do my best to keep it interesting.

Take care,

—Ken