Technicum Artis Magistra

Since I have to return it to the our public library tomorrow I finally finished reading "What Technology Wants" by Kevin Kelly. A book that starts out as promising as this one, putting the door ajar to a novel outlook on the way things are, the end almost had to disappoint. It does not explain what technology wants. It is filled with a smorgasbord of interesting tidbits, and does contains a very interesting thesis that the whole of technology, for which he coins the term "the technicum", is simply the next logical step in the evolution of things that started with the big bang. A lot of brilliant minds were consulted and that shows, it is a very interesting read. And when you name Brian Eno in your acknowledgements, the man whose work first showed me that video can be Art, you cannot really go wrong, can you?

The show where I saw that greatly inspiring work by Mr. Eno was "The Luminous Image" in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. I saw it as a wee lad in 1984 (yeah, right). Here is a very low quality video of him talking about the piece I saw back then:

 

 

I still have the catalog.

It's Alive! It's a L...

I do not quite like the overly suggesteive way this thing thrusts up at first, but here is a test of how these tree like structures may come into being. In a bare wasteland or on little islands appearing in a vast bubbling ocean. Oh wait, I was going to try to not make this a mega project!

 

Towards a Unified Animation of Mind and Matter

I am still busy with several project hoping they will culminate in one animation. Here is a look development test for the environments of one of the scenes, possibly the opening of this animated epos of scatterer-braininess wrapped in procedural matter-of-factness :

 

 

[Geek Alert!] Maya would not be Maya if I did not run into a number of quirks while creating this test. For one the Mental Ray renderer does render the Maya environment fog, but when using the camera far-near planes these seem to get stuck at the fist frame when batch rendering. To fix this very frame needs to be rendered separately, so I wrote a small python thingy (program is too big a word for these few lines of code) that uses the command line render to start a batch render for each individual frame. Joy!

Scattered Eye Brain

Eye Brain has been resurrected once more! But now he is sub surface scattered. So far I have only rigged the "tail" which now can stetch and contract considerably. Brains tend to not deform much, this one probably should not either. The Eyes need to be able to look at things, so I again need to set something up that flexes those eye muscles!

To appear in a short also featuring a fleshy blob and a one legged fingertip walker.

Big Foot, Two Arms.

I have been wokring in Maya a bit. As I am teaching Advanced Animation this semester, and since all the students want to animate characters, I thought I'd create a test of one myself. I have a project in mind, one of those ballooning animation ideas, which has a similar character in it. Here is an animation / render test:

My plan is to build on this test and combine it with the original idea for EyeBrain, which is a scene that was cut from my Thesis animation "if(!NULL){". Maybe I will even throw in the tree like structures from the recent Maya Experiment! Do I have a title yet? How about "Minding Matter (Dark)" or "Dark Mind(s) Matter". "Never Mind the Dark Matter" maybe?