Google just released Earth 6, with the Street View feature. I haven't found how to disable the Drunk Effect option, but I confess I had much fun taking these screenshots. Art for the lazy! Random art continues to fascinate me.
So, where in the world? As far as I remember: Paris, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Honolulu. Not in this order, that would be too easy. I've got another series of these, for a future post. In the meantime please drive safe.
See also in this blog:
Shooting (Pictures of) Bugs in 3D Games
Trust Your Luck
Last week, on the 14th, mathematician BenoƮt Mandelbrot died.
Digital artists widely honoured fractal geometry, his major contribution. In a nutshell, fractals are curves made of smaller replicas of themselves. Maybe I should say in a seashell... You know, the story of the tree that forks into branches that fork into branches that... Mandelbrot's statement was that some chaotic things in nature look so only because we fail to see the laws that organize them. Easy in the case of a tree, but Mandelbrot claimed that clouds, rocks, galaxies obeyed similar repetitive patterns.
There are funny things to note with these strange objects: a fractal shape normally can't be measured, because any section you attempt to start with turns out to be more sinuous than you expected, looking at it carefully. So you need a longer ruler. No matter how close you get to the object, there is always a new bend that bends into more bends, and so on. As a result the 'coast' is always longer than it seems. Another trick is that it's impossible to say how much you have zoomed in, since the shape is self-contained and repeats itself at all scales. So it's a looping zoom. Scary, isn't it?
The theory of fractals has been tried in various fields, where they help us understand how complex phenomena evolve, and whether they could be predicted or generated artificially. Various degrees of success have been obtained in biology, medical research, finance, cinema (special effects), radio-transmission, astronomy, etc.
Above: a computer-generated fractal object (image from Wikipedia)
Above: a real Romanesco cabbage (photograph from Fourmilab)
Photographer and graphic designer Robert Overweg takes stunning pictures of defects in computer 3D games.
Sometimes beauty lies in the uniqueness of things, in the fact that they're unexpected and impossible to reproduce. In addition, Overweg works arouse because of the tension they create. The world shown looks real, but obviously it's not!
Image via Robert Overweg.
See also Trust Your Luck in this blog.
1. Clean the floor!
2. Drop a big cube (for a 1:1 model, about 230m high)
4. Force the blue cube into an angle of the big one
5. Delete the blue cube and the intersected part
6. Turn around, and put the red cube at an opposite angle
7. Remove the red cube and the intersected part
8. Oops, a bit of red remaining inside. Almost done!
9. Better now. See yourself through?
Your CCTV tower is ready! Well, the real one is a bit more stylish, cubes are more distorted, but the idea is the same. If you try to describe it as an addition of things (a L-shaped base, two legs, and an a L-shaped overhang but reversed...), that's difficult. But if you see it as a subtraction, it's pretty simple: remove two basic volumes from a third one, and the building is what remains.
I suppose the stunning elegance of the CCTV tower is partly due to this great use of negative space. What is NOT there gives more strength to what is there. I already noticed that a logo could be greatly enhanced by adding empty areas and that music was more beautiful with silences, but I never really realised this could work in architecture too.
This picture was taken in 2004 in Beijing with a basic Sony Ericsson phone. I had the Solarize option on, and I just stuck the device to the mosquito net hanged at my window. No Photoshop processing or anything. In this mode, the camera would shuffle colors dramatically at your slightest movement. Art for the lazy! So what?
In his book The Art of Looking Sideways, graphic designer Alan Fletcher says: "For myself I bank on bricolage. The bricole was a medieval military machine for throwing stones. Nowadays the term refers to a shot in billiards which doesn't turn out as intended but is nevertheless successful. Luck, say those who know, is a talent."