randform

Bad hair – do or day?

When looking at my unkempt twirls in the morning this rather scary variation of Rapunzel came to my mind.

Just two links to humanoid robot videos as an update (randform posts e.g. here or here).

One video is displaying a quite good jumping humanoid robot, the other video is displaying the already rather wellknown Jules of hansonrobotics.com…..Looking at Jules reminds again at the question about faces as interfaces and the uncanny valley, as e.g. discussed in this randform post.

Rest of an Überraschungsei used for a pendulum

It is an interesting question how to approach big challenges. There exists the socalled Top-down and bottom-up design paradigma which is prevalent in computer programming but not only there. It appears also in math, where for example people study special examples (bottom-up)(like e.g. certain differential equations) as well as conceptional questions (top-down)(like e.g. construction of the number system via set theory). It is not only in programming useful to use both approaches. The top-down approach has often the advantage to detect conceptional connections, whereas the bottom-up approach has usually a better connection to applied problems. However sometimes also within the bottom-up approach unexpected connections may appear.

A funny connection between two more-or-less special applications is for example the fact that a discrete pendulum (a mathematical pendulum seen with a strobe light (and the classical counterpart of the quantum pendulum) can be identified with the movement of a ball in a billard with an elliptic shape (via certain coordinates, proof in my Ph.D. thesis). An ellipse is a generalized circle.

Another funny artistic mixture of these two concepts is the Oval with pendulum by Gabriel Orozco. (see also interview on pbs). I think I saw his elliptic billard table at the MAC in 2001, but I don’t remember wether it was part of a temporal exhibition or not and I couldn’t find too much information on the MAC online.

Currently Gabriel Orozco is busy with an equally interesting project. He and photographers Adam Broomberg + Oliver Chanarin and film maker Dustin Lynn are working on the first of several ‘mini missions’ to ‘ARTiculate™ some of the world’s most environmentally trashed regions with the end goal of then presenting work in response to their findings. (article on treehugger, the adventureecology website is a flash site so I cant link the information directly)

Last not least there exist of course the well-known connection between an ellipsoid or egg (3 dim analog of an ellipse) and a pendulum (see above image or e.g. this application for dowsing), but funnily a similar mixture of elliptic shapes and pendulum seems also to appear in astronomy. (?)

A link to a site which organizes art around the G8 summit in May in Heiligendamm.

From the website “art-goes-heiligendamm”:

The supporting institutions in Rostock hope that the art interventions will have a de-escalating effect. An alliance of around 30 NGO’s have called for an alternative summit. ■ ART GOES HEILIGENDAMM is cooperating, through lectures and Multitude e.V., with the G8 coordination group, who have invited many prominent speakers such as the Nobel prize winners Wangari Mathai and Vandana Shiva; Jean Ziegler; Étienne Balibar; Madjiguène Cissé – a speaker from the Sans-Papiers organisation in France; John Holloway, author of “Change the world without seizing the power” and many more.

The use of color in sculpture is a very difficult issue–

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manicone is online now. The coloring of manicone took more time than expected. The coloring made it necessary to consider theories and examples of artistic color compositions, physical mixing properties, technological limitations (calibrations) and infoesthetic basics (For a glimpse onto the problem of coloring and infoesthetics see e.g. this video lecture by tamara munzner (who was a visiting scientist of the TU math department in the mid nineties) or the review on pingmag.

It is a difficult question to find the right portion between colorful and colorful. Colors may be shouting. If they unfriendly shout you down then this is not acceptable. If the are too faint and disappear among the other colors then this is not acceptable either. Due to the transparency properties of manicone, color mixing was likewise an important question.

Tidying up I found an old work by me from 2001, which I submitted (unsucessfully..:)) to the Karl-Hofer Preis 2001. I included it today in the daytar page.
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images of imaginary worlds (fotographed on a playground) – a followup post to Orbitall.
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