Detail from recent experiments in 3d. Collective intelligence, AI, and Elon Musk have been on my mind lately. This image was made possible by a wealth of information and tools that are free for anyone with an Internet connection, notably Blender, Andrew Price aka “Blender Guru” videos on YouTube, and models available under the Creative Commons license (butterfly by Kirin Karpenko and LEDs by Sonny See, both available on Blendswap). Although not free, Julius Harling’s incredible Graswald also deserves mention. #creativecommonslicense
3d
Female Northern Cardinal /
Modeling tree branches /
Using Blender to model and Pepakura to produce paper patterns for tree branches.
Chicken slaughter /
Yesterday, fifteen of our chickens were slaughtered while I was away. I found piles of feathers all through the fields and two dead bodies but the rest were gone. A pack of coyotes must have attacked around the same time that an intense thunderstorm left things looking like a demon ripped through. Something turned the water in my fountain freakishly red. I found a few survivors, wet as rats, babbling anxiously as they wandered the fence line. Young chickens are so bright, curious and love to explore - it’s sad to see them lose their innocence to the inevitable predatory attack.
Pretty computer accidents /
Pretty computer accidents. I continue to work on a labor-intensive sculpture (electrolier). This video is tangentially related, insofar as I've discovered some cool visuals along the way. It would take me a long time to explain the sequence of computer accidents that created this landscape. Suffice it to say that the cloud and the mountainous earth are two different spatial interpretations of the same object, which in engineering terms means that the algorithm was an explosive failure. "Pretty is as pretty does" is not true in this case.
Artifacts /
Artifacts of a tedious creative process, incidentally piling up beside a childhood photo. July 2018