Thanks to Angeles for passing on the amazing Florida Plant Atlas, with hundreds (thousands?) of images of plant specimens.
Growing Shell Forms: Progress
More progress “growing” heatsink shells – each of these is built up using successive images in Processing, then converted using Fiji (similar to how an MRI can be turned into a 3D model). They’re then cleaned up and rendered in Rhino.
The fingers will act as heatsink fins, drawing up heat. Spirals, concentric circles, and various parameters for random growth change the form.
Experimenting with sharp fins at the top.
Growing Shell Forms
Some in-progress images of a new project, commissioned for the Digital Spring Media Art Festival in Austria in March. Above, a rendering of a 3D-printed copper heatsink/shell; below some sketches in Processing exploring how to grow the layers of the shell.
Icicle Atlas
I’m totally obsessed with the Icicle Atlas dataset from the University of Toronto… so I downloaded every one and made this poster. Click the image to get a larger-res version.
(The site also includes STL files of each icicle for 3D printing!)
Empty Apartments: Technical Notes
This month, the curatorial collaborative project Drift Station, which I’m a part of along with Angeles Cossio, released an online project titled Empty Apartments. We pulled nearly 125,000 photographs of apartments and houses for rent on Craigslist that were completely empty because of a removal service, and presented them as an interactive online exhibition. The project took nearly two years of work, and much of it was manual (Angeles triple-checking every single image by hand to remove ones that included common spaces or non-apartments), but we also used several automated processes and machine learning to sort the photos.
Random Path Between Two Points
I needed a bit of code that would create a random path between two predefined points, and realized that the problem was actually a bit harder than I had expected, but the results are really cool. Using Perlin noise, the paths can go from angular to flowing by changing one variable!
Diamond/Copper Heatsink
A heatsink made from diamond and copper by Noctua.
Microsurgeon
Playing through a bunch of old Intellivision games this summer and stumbled on Microsurgeon from 1982, where you navigate through the body and vaporize bacteria and tumors.
Fingerprints and Biometrics
A few interesting images, via this great-looking show “Data (after)Lives: The Persistence of Encoded Identity” at the University of Pittsburgh.
Above, Francis Galton’s notation for fingerprints from this book; below, his own fingerprints arranged in a paw-like formation.
Light Map of SW United States
A really lovely, slightly glitchy satellite map of lights over the southwest United States. Taken on August 31, 2000 and found buried deep in the NOAA FTP server.