Squared Spiral

From a new series. Not quite as interesting as the Ulam spiral.

I've been intending to consolidate a list of Portland, Oregon artists that use some math in their work, and artists with a technical background. These are not geek artists. They are primarily interested in art and may be more or less inspired by math or technology.

I include Michael Knutson (paintings based on quasiregular rhombic tiling), Arcy Douglas (Sierpinski triangle fractals built with hexagonal tiles), Eva Lake (for her interest in the Richter Scale), and Julian Voss-Andreae (sculpture based on molecular structure, etc.). Also Stephan Soihl, and Martha Morgan (for "The Golden Ratio in Tryon Creek State Park"). More to come.

Earthquakes

A sinusoidal ridge from Sinusoidal Grids. Earthquakes happen. A noticeable rise or fall in the normal depth of coastal waters is nature's tsunami warning. Move away from the shore immediately. (See the U.S. Geological Survey Earthquake Hazards Program).

I've been trying to create a geometric representation of a landscape (mountain ridges) from a long distance, like a Google Earth image. Since I used a sinusoidal motif this reminded me of seismograph prints. So I'm combining a landscape with a seismograph-like motif.

Dart-Rhombus Recede

This is a 3-fold, dart-rhombus, radial tiling. Each dart is decorated or marked by rhombi which recede from the adjacent rhombus. This divides each dart-rhombus into ever smaller copies. Each adjacent dart-rhombus is a trivially simple fractal.


I generated this image with six rows, but I have also done a 3 row version, both of which can be seen in my Tilings project. A description of the process for generating the basic dart-rhombus structure without the decoration is here.

In these digitial drawings I superimpose an image on each tile. Sometimes the image is programmatically varied from tile to tile. In these cases the tile with its marking is no longer a true tiling in the mathematical sense, though the underlying structure is. The marking or decoration of the tiles, other than by systematic coloring, often obscures the structure. Infinitely many interesting tilings are possible without this obfuscation. I choose this approach because I'm less interested in the math than I am in inventing a quasi natural image.

Pascal Cotte and Mona Lisa at OMSI

Yesterday I was able to attend a presentation at OMSI (Oregon Museum of Science and Industry) by Pascal Cotte. OMSI is opening an exhibit on Leonardo da Vinci, featuring a whole room devoted to Cotte's 240-megapixel, multi-spectral scans of the Mona Lisa. Cotte not only invented the camera which uses 13 wavelengths from ultraviolet light to infrared; he also supervised the exhaustive analysis of the resulting images.


Through this analysis Cotte is able to reveal hidden details of how da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa, and how she appeared to da Vinci's contemporaries. The exhibit highlights Cotte's discovery of 25 secrets about the Mona Lisa, including evidence that she did in fact have eyebrows.

Figure/Ground in Similar Tilings

These next two digital prints of tilings share almost the same code. Other than the colors, only a few minor changes were made to the program. In the first, the figure is paramount, and in the second it's the ground.



And both of the above two prints have a lot in common with the following, though the above are radial tilings, and the following is based on Fermat's spiral, not a tiling.

7-Fold Tiling

This is a 7-fold radial tiling of the plane with a dart-rhombus tile set. It's a test example in my new series of n-fold, dart-rhombus radial tilings. Technically it's not a tiling since the image in each tile is slightly modified, but it is a tiling since it is constructed from congruent dart-rhombus tiles that fill the plane.