Newness – W.W.W.

Cover art for band Wap Wap Wow.

Hello, quick update. Project is for aforementioned band – music is repetitive in the best sort of way. Vocals become instruments, layered, reflected in a call and receive choir and strings thing. Reasons for lame technical breakdown will become clear after I post a couple of images that I have been given or found as a response to the brief.

Above: Monty Python , provided by Rose (of Wap Wap Wow [w.w.w.] inception).Below: stills from Auguste Lumière (1862-1954) and Louis Lumière (1864-1948), Danse Serpentine –

Early filmmakers loved dancers. I can’t locate the source of this film, but iterations of the Serpentine Dance were particular favorites of both Thomas Edison and the Lumiere Brothers. Inspired by dancer Loie Fuller’s famed skirt dances, in which colored lights projected onto her billowing garments, this film (and others like it) was hand-tinted to achieve similar affects. Fuller’s solo was mesmerizing, and her copycat film subjects no less so.

Particularly interested in the hand colouring and symmetry of these examples. Surreal, seemingly random colour selection. Will come back to this idea of layering on colour as an enhancement and fantastical act. For now will draw parallel to the music with the multilayered repetition and its original form as a garage band demo that could constantly be added to and altered.

If You Could… use a really small saw

Helped out show build for If You Could collaborate – this mostly involved using tiny jewelery saws to dislocate laser cut ply words (pictured is Craig Ward‘s contribution). Other then that, all s’well. Good show, good men.

Richard Feynman, Art

Will be miny case studying Richard Feynman. Whilst researching came across his art. I’m not talking specifically about art and science in my dissertation, though it has cropped up during my reading. There are many examples of artists working wit scuentific phenomen. I think I concentrated on some during my inital postings re: the diss. Anyway, Feyman is featuring in the “magnum opus” and initially I think his sensibilities towards the depiction of physics to the layman is unique, but he has a real rennaisance style attitude towards art which I think is  just as unique. First a weird screen grab of him talking about his art–

And now his equations/sketches which remind me of the lists I make, minus the quantum mechanics –

This is a oil study of his artist friend Jirayr Zorthian who taught him to draw (and who he is talking to in the text bit above) –

He’s not the best artist, I just like his way of seeing the world, and i like him.

100 De Beauvoir Road

Helped Ian Wright today. More on that later. Image courtesy of the lovely Roderick Mills. Nice, nice man.

The girl weilding the glue gun is Chloe Bryon, she’s a Brighton equivlent of me, except she has done more incredible good things like go to New York for 5 weeks, interview the likes of Milton Glaser and Michael Beirut under her joint student research forum, The Transatlantic Design Company. God Damn.

Standing Ovation

Bernard Gigounon. Rain has never been the same. Extremely witty, multilayered and somehow feels like a problem solved when you watch it. All sublime goodness.

Sam Messenger

Beautifully worked pieces, mainly in pen & ink on paper, ‘exploring combinations of repetition, geometry, and direct observation’.

Four Books on Meaurement

In the first of a series of contemporary and historical Illustrators / Artists that have a footing spanning science and art, is Albrecht Dürer. The following is a passage from a previous essay contextualizing my own illustrative practice.

Whilst the substantial body of his work came from prints and paintings, he was also a published Theorist of Mathematics. He made studies of things like perspective, form and geometry that come from observation and theory. Dürer wrote Four Books on Measurement, in which he depicted platonic solids in net form and diagrams of the construction of polyhedrons. These studies made up the basis for his perfectly conceived ‘masterpieces’ that showed his deep level of understanding of how things exist in space, in relation to each other and the effect this has on the page.

His studies in maths allowed him to apply his theory into what are now considered the most perfect representations in watercolour. CONTEXT etc –

And now a word from one of our sponsers, Wiki-media:

Dürer’s work on geometry is called the Four Books on Measurement (Underweysung der Messung mit dem Zirckel und Richtscheyt). The first book focuses on linear geometry. Dürer’s geometric constructions include helices, conchoids and epicycloids. He also draws on Apollonius, and Johannes Werner‘s ‘Libellus super viginti duobus elementis conicis’ of 1522. The second book moves onto two dimensional geometry, i.e. the construction of regular polygons. Here Dürer favours the methods of Ptolemy over Euclid. The third book applies these principles of geometry to architecture, engineering and typography. In architecture Dürer cites Vitruvius but elaborates his own classical designs and columns. In typography, Dürer depicts the geometric construction of the Latin alphabet, relying on Italian precedent. However, his construction of the Gothic alphabet is based upon an entirely different modular system. The fourth book completes the progression of the first and second by moving to three-dimensional forms and the construction of polyhedrons. Here Dürer discusses the five Platonic solids, as well as seven Archimedean semi-regular solids, as well as several of his own invention. In all these, Dürer shows the objects in net. Finally, Dürer discusses the Delian Problem and moves on to the ‘construzione legittima’, a method of depicting a cube in two dimensions through linear perspective. It was in Bologna that Dürer was taught (possibly by Luca Pacioli or Bramante) the principles of linear perspective, and evidently became familiar with the ‘costruzione legittima’ in a written description of these principles found only, at this time, in the unpublished treatise of Piero della Francesca. He was also familiar with the ‘abbreviated construction’ as described by Alberti and the geometrical construction of shadows, a technique of Leonardo da Vinci. Although Dürer made no innovations in these areas, he is notable as the first Northern European to treat matters of visual representation in a scientific way, and with understanding of Euclidean principles. In addition to these geometrical constructions, Dürer discusses in this last book of Underweysung der Messung an assortment of mechanisms for drawing in perspective from models, such as the camera lucida and provides woodcut illustrations of these methods that are often reproduced in discussions of perspective.

Gerd Jansen

Gerd Jansen – ‘Ein Experiment Zur Ganzheit’ 1983/84

He has written many books which I am connecting to the Four Books on Measure (Durer) and not just ’cause they are both German. Instead there is the relationship between pure observation and recording as a means to understanding something. And also in creating the apparatus from a personal illustration that acts as it’s own hypothosis.

And now a bad google translation –

“The concept of measurement turns out to be the intersection of artistic and scientific strategies.”

– From his book ‘Ein Experiment Zur Ganzheit‘, or An Experiment of Wholeness.

Here is a picture of him for posterity. I also like that piece behind him.

Another quality quote from our friends at Google Translate regarding The Institute of Pictorial Thinking (Institut für bildnerisches Denken) which Jansen and his wife set up to deal with what they thought lacked in the education of Art and Science –

“Pictorial thought is that on the basis of practical experience in the creative process itself. The idea the tension, rational between sensed intuitively and rationally. He though form seeking its proper form of clarity in artistic process. The complimentary nature of perception, thought and action requires that practical artistic actvity is not possible without theoretical discussion – No art without science, no science without art.”

Mae Jemison

She-Star Sailor, Mae Jemison speaks about the importance of Art and Science being taught together.

TED TALK