Tuesday, August 5, 2008

Suzanne Graves' exploding art

I'd come to know Suzanne Graves as an avid explorer and photographer, but recently she took up scripting and her art evolved from there.

Here are two examples that she showed me in a sandbox on Saturday.



On her blog she states, "I’ve always been fascinated by 3D math surfaces. You just pick some equation, and see what it produces. Change a parameter or two, and you have something different. I have spent hours and nights with Matlab or Mathematica doing this.

What a nerd.

When I started Second Life, I was expecting to be able to import math surfaces directly using 3D files. I was expecting to be able to build incredibly fun stuff. Then I discovered there were only… prims.

Argh. I don’t want to pile up cubes. But I can write programs which do that."

5 comments:

Pavig Lok said...

Hawt! /me loves math. Very well done ;)))

Anonymous said...

Suzanne is cool. I hate maths.

Siri said...

this reminds me of the work by artist Cornelia Parker...http://blog.tate.org.uk/tate-tales/?p=36

Anonymous said...

Bett.... You took really impressive views. Thank you so much !!!

I am just experimenting for now... and I was surprised to have something working (1000 prims moving and rotating did not bring the sim down !). I have several other ideas involving fractals, but it needs to mature.

Here is some information about these things:
- The 'Slinky' thing - I love that name - is made of 200 circles (hollow cylinders), and it is made using the technique described with some of my pictures, here and here
- The Wireflower is made of about 1500 prims (500 spheres for vertices and 1000 cylinders for the edges)
- The "explosion" makes prims (circles for the Slinky, cylinders for the Wireflower) go to a random location and acquire a random rotation.

When the flying prims have reached that location, they come back to their original position.

@Arahan: maybe you will hate math less now...
@Siri: I love the 'organized chaos' in Cornelia Parkers work. This gives me some ideas...

Anonymous said...

Why do Americans call maths "math"? I never understood as it's an abbreviation for mathematics.

Anyhoo, no Suzanne I still hate maths because it makes my brain ache, but I do like the look of what you're doing.