maybe i should start this post with that lame line such as: "wow it has been so long..." i will divert from that right now.

i have started working on my antenna painting project in a very real way today. i spent the last few weeks trying to find a good way to render the dragon curve (or any recursive folding system) in a vector like form so i can scale the lengths of the arms to the right wavelength(λ).



i found a nice script written in PostScript that renders the fractal beautifully posted on Dr. Charpentier's page about L-Systems. Gratefully this made my life very easy for the transfer to the image surface. i would like to improve on this so the curve never rolls on itself in the line. Guess i will need to learn some PostScript.

i decided to try to match channel 6 wavelength . This is of course the most overused channel partly because it is default. The λ of channel 6 will also allow me be sloppy as i am truly hand drawing this antenna; thus, a quarter millimeter here or there will not sink the ship.

the unvieling of fontanaBot

6june2008: day 1020 of my graduate career and day 4 of Zer01 Festival 2008.

the public seemed delighted by the knife wielding robot known as fontanaBot. throngs of visitors crowded 1st street tonight and to my eye the numbers are here-to-fore unprecedented for the South Bay First Fridays. the event was ramped up for SubZero, an exposition of projects in honor of Zer01 2008. nearly 50 participants exhibited hacks, hardware, interactivity, and all-around art. here's a teaser video from us:



the hearing loss i am feeling this morning induced by the nieghboring project Drone Machines by Tristan Shone(which btw is an amazing project!) is a small price to pay for the downright success of fontanaBot's first public outing. the machinic artist executed dozens of works over 6 hours and evoked all the responses that one would expect from disbelief to amusement and back to disgust again, a little controversy is always good , no? read more at www.thomasasmuth.com

much to my amusement i learned that the other robotic art exhibition at SubZero was a project by my neighbor in Oakland three units down! the Boise Cascade has become a hotbed of hardware art.

international icon for wtf, computer!

sitting next to ethan in the lab and watching our body communication with the screen. faintly, i can hear: "I can't do that Dave."

not my idea

just had to look when i heard Ray and Tom on NPR Car Talk talk about their website idea: paperbagoveryourfacebook.com

algorithmic sculpture update

my research continues, i was unhappy with the results of the ribbon of plexi so I replaced it with acrylic rod which is much more line like. I am applying L-System Rules to the acrylic rod and allowing the aesthetics of math to take shape.

This video shows a simple set of instructions: 1 unit forward, two units 90 degrees down, 1 unit at 0 degrees pitch and 270 degrees yaw.


This video shows the partially rendered 6 iterations of L-System formula: FX, where X is X+YF+> and Y is >>-FX-Y