Friday, April 28, 2006

Marty

Follow-up to last week's Martin Thompson/Sierpinski post: in the days following the article there was some activity in the letters page of the newspaper in question. In case you didn't catch this, it was covered off nicely by Tom at WellUrban.

Thursday, April 27, 2006

Lathe

This (right) is out now, too. It's my very first seht polycarbonate lathe-cut record; it's a 7" and it's choice. It's released on Dunedin label Root Don Lonie for Cash, and it sounds real niiiice.

I also did an interview, here, for music 'zine Foxy Digitalis.

Woom linkage



Woom's very new web-presence.

Woom show review and comments thread on ArtBash. There's a fight goin' down already. Good stuff.

Wednesday, April 26, 2006

Woom again

So I've been in Nelson, for the Woom show, amongst other things. The opening of the show was a great success, with a huge turnout of happy and impressed punters. I had a lot of positive feedback about my work, and even managed to sell some.



You'll notice that the gallery walls are red, rather than the customary white. This was an experiment, and I really think it works rather well.

The refreshments were various infused vodkas, supplied by a local distillery under the auspices of "taste-testing". They were served in shotglasss and consumed neat.

Afterwards we went out for a few drinks. And ended up having an utter shitload of drinks. Ow. I won't be posting the photos of, for example, my brother's partner and I dancing the Charleston on top of every one of those little green electricity transformer boxes on the walk home. Or of my brother and I wrestling with temporary speed restriction road signs (me: Greek-style, him:WWF-style). Or the video-clip of me bellowing at the top of my voice "I LURRVE MACROCARPAS" and leaping from the top of one of those afore-mentioned little green electricity transformer boxes into a finely-topiaried specimen of same.

Well, ok, maybe one.

Here's a tally of my consumption for the evening:
4 x Carlsberg lagers
between 8 and 11 shots of infused vodkas of varying strength
1 Monteiths Original
3 x Guinness
4 x triple Centenarro Blanco tequila
1 x triple Tanqueray gin
2 x Frangelico and lime
4 x Smirnoff Black Ice RTD (don't ask) (seriously)

Compiling that list, I am left feeling a strange combination of awe and shame. I got off lightly though; all I ended up with was a scratched arm, and a nasty afternoon-hangover.

(hover mouse over images for captions; click for bigger versions)

Wednesday, April 19, 2006

Sierpinski

An interesting story appeared in the DomPost yesterday. But, first some background.

Waclaw Sierpinski was a Polish mathematician who lived from 1882 til 1969. In 1915 he described what became known as the "Sierpinski gasket", which is a kind of fractal (which has, incidentally, been documented as appearing in Italian art from about the 13th century). The gasket is also called the Sierpinski "sieve" or Sierpinski "triangle". (source: mathworld.wolfram.com). It's created by the following "beautiful recurrence equation":


As you can doubtless see, the geometric method of creating the gasket is to start with a triangle and cut out the middle piece. This results in three smaller triangles to which the process is continued. The nine resulting smaller triangles are cut in the same way, and so on, indefinitely. (source: astronomy.swin.edu.au)

Now consider the Sierpinski carpet. Same deal as the gasket, but constructed with squares, instead of triangles. It can be described "using string rewriting beginning with a cell [1] and iterating the rules":



This is all fine and dandy, but "so what" I hear you say. So lets look at the "carpet" in three dimensions (below, left). We're suddenly presented with an object of uncommon beauty, which is typified by the interesting characteristics of inversely proportionate volume and surface area. (That is, the more iterations of the 'pattern' are made, the surface area increases in direct proportion to the volume, which decreases). (Aside: Fractal antennae based upon the Sierpinski carpet can be used in communication devices such as cell-phones, where they can give far superior performance over the usual rubbery stalk.)

This "cube" is also called a Menger sponge. The Menger sponge, in addition to being a fractal, is also a super-object for all compact one-dimensional objects, i.e., the topological equivalent of all one-dimensional objects can be found in a Menger sponge (Peitgen et al. 1992). (Hmmmmmmmm.) (Make sure you play with the cool 3d models, too).

So back to yesterday's DomPost story, which describes how the New York Folk Art museum (described, no doubt for calculated effect, as a major New York art museum) has "picked up" (actually, had donated) two works by local Wellinton "outsider" artist Martin Thompson (pictured, right). This was some sort of post-script to an exhibition of 40 "obsessive" drawings by five international artists, including Thompson, which closed at the museum last month.

The works illustrating the article (left) are not actually the works in question, but any mathmetician worth his salt would immediately identify Thompson's "obsessive" "geometric abstraction" as an execution of a variation on Sierpinski's carpet.

Which basically leaves me wondering, well, when does advanced mathematics become art, folk or not? (And also cursing my laziness at not picking up some of his work, when I met him about five years ago, for a lot less than the $3000 or so they are each commanding now.) But mostly thinking "why don't I understand this?" I personally don't care if Thompson has been copying illustrations from a tome on fractals from the 70s for twenty-six years (very popular, they were in the 70s, fractals); or rendering his own formulae (and those of others); or if it's a complete coincedence; or all of the above. But what is the American Folk Art Museum playing at, for example? And what is discovering their $3000 "outsider art" drawing is actually copied out of a 200-level university maths text book going to mean to all the people who have reportedly been lining up to buy a piece of the action?

Some web-resources on Martin Thomson, most showing more examples of his work:
> Obsessive Drawing, at the American Folk Art Museum, 2006.
> Review of Dirty Pixels, which premiered at Artspace in August 2002 accompanied by a catologue. The show was also exhibited by Adam Art Gallery from April 12-25 2003 and finished showing at the Waikato Museum of Art on 18 January 2004
> Biography of Martin Thompson on Stuart Shepherd's Self-Taught & Visionary Art in New Zealand resource.



PS: As an artist Taylor is not alone in his mathematics fixation. This image (right) shows a metal rendition of the Menger sponge created by digital sculptor Bathsheba Grossman.

SEE ALSO: Box Fractal, Cantor Dust, Cantor Square Fractal, Delannoy Number, Haferman Carpet. Hours of fun.

Tuesday, April 18, 2006

Inferno

Went to Martinborough. Had wedding. Much drunk. Very drunk. Armed with BBQ firelighters, three petanque sets, and the inspiration that only comes at around 1am, we constructed our own little inebriated vision of lawn sports in hell.

Chief co-conspirator Mr. B >>>>>>>>

(click images for larger versions)

Woom

Woom is a new gallery space opening in Nelson. One of their stated principal aims is to not be shite, like the other art spaces in Nelson.


With this in mind, I was more than enthusiastic to be involved when the space's manager, a Mr. A Clover (full blood relation) graciously offered me the opportunity to show some work in the inaugral exhibition.

So Woom1 will be opening on Thursday night; I will be showing these.

Pours

This is out.




As is this.




And this.

Monday, April 10, 2006

Podder

I've begun syndicating my podcasts for Foxy Digitalis. No doubt there will be some other things of interest popping up from time-to-time as well.

You can hook into the feed here, or from the little icon below. There may be some teething troubles, so please bear with me.

  seht podcast feed [RSS 2.0]  

Friday, April 07, 2006

Oil

Today's Dom Post carried a story from the Nelson Mail about Jenni Phillips, who is extremely allergic to patchouli scent. Supposedly she is so sensitive to it that "she only needs to catch a whiff of it in the perfume people are wearing, to collapse in severe anaphylactic shock."

At the risk of sounding flippant or disrepectful to Ms. Phillips - neither impression is intended, this is a serious problem - may I enquire of her as to why the fuck she is still living in Nelson. It must surely be second only to Goa or some fucken place like that in the hippies-per-square-foot statistics, and generally overrun by the stinking, deodorant-slash-antiperspirant-eschewing patchouli-daubed ropeheads.

I hate the stuff too - one patchouli-favouring psychotic ex-gf was all it took - call me a dog; hell, call me a Pavlov's dog - and so I suggest to Ms. Phillips that that in addition to her standard several shots of adrenaline, she start carrying about with her a large can of mace and a bucket of industrial-strength caustic soda. That way she can take the hippy by the rope and go on the offensive; when she encounters someone wearing the patchouli oil scent that is such a danger to her well-being, she should use the mace to disable them while she then melts they asses right there and then on the pavement.

Bussed

It would seem as if the buses are trying to tell us something:


(click image to view larger version)

It would also seem that they need to get their stories straight.

I'm in love with today; I want to be back in Sydney. So time for a song from one of Aussie's finest, the Go-Betweens, and from their finest album - 16 Lover's Lane.

The Go-Betweens - Love is a sign (right-click and Save As to download)

I wish you had a big house / and that your work would start to sell...

"Arguably Australia's greatest ever pop group, The Go-Betweens seemed to save the best for last when they split in 1989. (They reunited in 1999, and have issued two more studio recordings since that time). 16 Lovers Lane is simply breathtaking; it is a deeply moving, aurally sensual collection of songs about relationships and the broken side of love that never lapses into cheap sentimentality or cynicism... " (Thom Jurek, allmusic.com)