Tidal disruption event

Loosely inspired by the nuclear fusion process in stellar cores. This process originally gave the universe the raw elements from which to build the first atoms, and eventually human civilization.

A tidal disruption event occurs when a star ventures too close to a black hole and is torn apart by its massive gravitational force.

Image Construction:

  • The base image for this work was generated by a distorted Brownian motion algorithm and warped many times in various ways.
  • Inputs or outputs of the base texture warping functions were retained and recombined in different ways to create the masking layer. this generates the bright orange and red pattern seen
  • The background was composed of layered high frequency noise and integrated with the masked texture using yet more combinations of the same warping functions
  • Finally, post-processing and some final domain warping effects give the work its finished appearance.

evaporating fog

may in san diego is a grey time. day starts with dense fog and the sky is covered with clouds more at home in the wintery midwest.

some days, the greyness burns off and gives way to light. the feeling when this occurs is direct, intense, and exhalting, as if opening one’s eyes for the first time

image composed of a jittered color gradient woven from many (very) distorted polygons

hermēneus

“the listener, not the speaker, determines the meaning of an utterance” – Heinz von Foerster

information theory is awash in theories and frameworks dictating the precise amount of information conveyed by any given message. however, the ability of the message recipient is often presupposed and a deeply implicit assumption in many of these frameworks.

here i explore the loss of information that may occur when such an implicit assumption is made explicit and called into question

background composed of many layers of low alpha polygons (each distorted in polar coordinate space) and colored by a jittered color gradient

foreground composed of arrays of bits (arranged as columns) set to a binary value based on a pareto distribution and subsequently grouped into lines

bloom

digital rendering
plotted with Axidraw

Above:

50 concentric closed chaikin curves based on 100 radial points arranged in a user-defined pattern and randomly perturbed, with an incrementally increasing theta offset for each additional layer

Also pictured, the same design plotted on stained paper (a current experimentation) with an AxiDraw A3 machine

corruption

each of these images are generated from a noise based flow fields variably perturbed and increasingly constrained

these images resulted from an exploration of perlin noise after getting bored with the somewhat predictable patterns.

the baseline algorithm is the same, with only the parameters for noise generating changing. particles are started randomly and have some added behaviors (such as splitting/rejoining and deviating from course) to add depth and dynamism

for those interested, some resources that helped:

thanks to Jørgen Nystad for his instruction on a scalable high-res rendering workflow