a little preview of our new line of slipcast porcelain pieces, Reaction based on reaction diffusion. These are 8″ dessert plates.
“Written Images; a project in contemporary generative print design and art. Its final products will be a book that presents programmed images by various artists. Each print in process will be calculated individually – which makes every single book unique.”
Last night we made a Processing sketch for Written Images. Since we left our submission until the last minute, we decided to adapt an old project….due to my recent trip to the Aquarium, the barnacle sketch came to mind. Our main hurdle was figuring out how to tile our sketch to create the 4080×2720 px required for the book layout and stay under the 15 second time limit. Since we had a lot of geometry to draw, using the processing drawing methods turned out to be way too slow and we had to change the sketch to draw all triangles using OPENGL commands. This meant we also had to use OPENGL lights and control the camera via GL. I think the sketch came out ok, although I’d definitely like to work on it more when I get a chance.
Each execution of the program, a new random double curved NURBS surface is created for the barnacles to grow on. Colors range from yellow to pink based on generation of the barnacle, yellow barnacles randomly subdivide into pinker and pinker ones. The pores will also be open to different degrees between the different executions of the program. We also made a straighter version… incase the smoothed version doesn’t run fast enough on their computer.
I went into Boston this week and spent an afternoon soaking up inspiration at the New England Aquarium. As usual, I spent some time transfixed at the live coral display. I particularly love these guys, who are Zoanthus sociatus or Button Polyps. They mostly reproduce by budding asexually and thus form dense colonial mats. Wikipedia tells me that since they are a member of Hexacorallia each polyp should have tentacles in multiples of six, but I’m too lazy to count.
I created this design yesterday for the Shapeways SIGGRAPH competition which asked designers to submit any design that costs less than $200 to 3dprint. Our submission is a sculptural vase generated by reaction diffusion, a process which simulates how chemicals diffusing across a surface react with one another to produce stable patterns.
made with Processing, rendered in Sunflow, polygons reduced to 500,000 for 3d printing with Meshlab. all free open source software!
We are playing around with using blob detection to determine whether features in a reaction diffusion pattern will become ridges or holes in the design. Here’s a meshlab screenshot showing our first result. Hopefully we will have a real copy of this design to show you next week as it is being 3d printed in ceramic.
Catching up on more old news here…. we had a lot of fun at the Renegade Craft Fair in Brooklyn a couple of weeks ago. We used some of the leftover panels from our NYIGF tradeshow booth to add more display space to our usual bent wood display (not pictured).
Dendrite earrings (24kt gold plated) are featured in this month’s Lucky Magazine
The article features the favorite items of electro-pop singer Olga Bell who says “I mostly buy jewelry in antique shops, but I really like these – they’re inspired by coral.” I’ve never heard of Olga Bell before, but she is clearly a cool chick. Thanks for picking us Olga!
Here’s a few photos of our Cell Cycle bracelets being worn. On the left is the Interstice bracelet and on the right we have the Interstice, Wave, and Porous. The bracelets are 3d printed by the selective laser sintering of nylon plastic.
I can’t believe it has taken us almost a year to post photos on them on a person. Thanks to our intern Brie for modeling. The site is our partially overgrown backyard… we may shoot some more images with a studio background next week.
more photos are on our flickr page
We’ve been talking about doing some designs for ceramics for awhile now. So without further delay I bring you these sketches we made a few days ago for some cup designs based on diffusion reaction.
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