Innovative artistry

[willow]

The work of Daniel Rozin (http://www.smoothware.com/danny/index.html) is ingenious in that he uses technology, a comprehension of the physics of light and the human eye, and artistic talent to create pieces that are spellbinding. Check out the video of his wooden mirror, for example. Or the weave mirror. Amazing.

If no other such thread exists, if you know of other artists who wield technology well, please share. If it does, please move my post. I did a quick search, but didn't find where it should go.

[stuck]

your link is malformed

fixed (http://www.smoothware.com/danny/index.html)

[willow]

your link is malformed

fixed (http://www.smoothware.com/danny/index.html)

Oops. Thanks. That's what doing a ctrl-v without looking gets you.

[Qfwfq]

That's really weird. I'm not entirely sure how they work, is there a link providing information on it?

[willow]

I haven't found anything more than his site. If you watch his videos, at the end he usually shows the details of the moving parts. I'm pretty sure a computer does the data acquisition from a video camera, and various positions of the individual parts correspond a shade. Electric motors move the pieces. You can hear the moving parts. I found the weave mirror easiest to understand, but utterly amazing that he understand the shading so well.

[willow]

Alan Turing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing) wrote a famous developmental biology paper called "The chemical basis for morphogenesis (http://www.dna.caltech.edu/courses/cs191/paperscs191/turing.pdf)" in 1952. It was all but ignored for a long time, but lately people are still trying to apply it natural systems.

This guy, John McCabe (http://www.vagueterrain.net/journal14/jonathan-mccabe/01), has taken the formulas and turned them into artwork.

[Skinart]

Its a real-time example of optimization art, like a photo-mosaic. Here's a link (http://www.oberlin.edu/math/faculty/bosch/optart_survey.pdf) to a paper on the mathematics of it. And here's a link (http://www.dominoartwork.com/optart.html) to what the author of that paper did with the knowledge.

In layman terms, Rozin has a camera piping in a feed to a computer which is breaking the image into even divisions, like pixels. It then runs through an algorithm to find the best match of light value. It probably uses a black and white camera to aid in this. Each light value corresponds to a given rotation of the media being used, and in most of them, this creates light value by causing varying amounts of shadow.

Cute.

DiamondWillow: He doesn't have to understand the shading at all. He just has to have a function for how light value changes as the pieces are rotated, and then program in stops for various light values. He really only needs a handful of rotation positions to get decent results. Eight would do just fine for most of what he is accomplishing, but more will allow for greater detail.

[willow]

DiamondWillow: He doesn't have to understand the shading at all. He just has to have a function for how light value changes as the pieces are rotated, and then program in stops for various light values. He really only needs a handful of rotation positions to get decent results. Eight would do just fine for most of what he is accomplishing, but more will allow for greater detail.

Thanks for the links and such. He does but he doesn't. There are many many people who understand pixels, but this guy is creating them out of some pretty cool stuff. It is not so much that he came up with all the ideas he uses, but that he has synthesized them into something so cool. And that is what makes it art and not just computer science. IMHO, of course.

[Skinart]

To me it's the sort of thing that isn't diminished by having a 'simple' mathematical root, but enhanced in its beauty because of it. I think there is some extra artistry in convincing functions to do the heavy lifting for you--not needing to know the details intimately, just needing to know how do describe them sufficiently to get the job done.

I do agree that his work is lovely and remarkable. I love the fact that you can read the lips of the guy in the wooden mirror movie clip. I am also amused that his artificial mirrors are different than normal mirrors in that they enlarge the subject they 'reflect'.