As an artist I create and explore emergent phenomena in complex systems. As an engineer I develop tools for applying creativity.
I recently showed some artwork related to my rollerblade street scans in an NYC Lower East Side gallery. Those were made with lidar so I thought it would be fitting to use laser beams to make cyanotype images based on the data. Below I’ll take you through what I learned while hacking together the process and how I put together the final laser plots. Laser Projector Many years ago I built a…
Meetings As a kid I passed a lot of time in my own head. I went to a Quaker school for the first couple of grades where they would regularly gather us all for meeting and have us sit quietly. If the spirit moved you to speak you were encouraged to stand up and do so to the group. I would sit there and get lost in my own thoughts, but every so often someone would stand and speak out. It always felt…
SideFX Houdini is a tool from the visual effects industry which is used for tasks which involve procedurally generating or manipulating geometry, like simulating explosions using fluid dynamics or synthesizing a city based on geometric rules. It provides a node-based visual programming environment with a large library of common operations built in, but also makes it easy to drop in custom code…
One of my favorite joys is exploring a city late at night on rollerblades. I’ve been doing it fairly regularly for about 10 years now, first in Boston and then in NYC. Every time day turns to night and back again a city takes a breath. At night people flow out or huddle up in buildings, leaving the streets clear for the people and machines that reset the urban environment for the next day. Garbage…
Self-reproducing QR code agents
(This is a project I did during the summer of 2023 that I’m writing about now.) A pen plotter is a machine that moves a pen/pencil/etc. around under computer control to make drawings. A popular modern one is the AxiDraw by Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories . It comes in different sizes, with the largest being able to cover an A1 (841x594 mm) sheet of paper. But the price scales quickly with the size…
Over the weekend I prototyped a tool for tattooing with a robot arm. I think the idea got in my head almost ten years ago when I saw this project by two French designers named Pierre Emm and Johan da Silveira at Autodesk’s Pier 9 where they used a big industrial robot arm to make some tattoos. They had previously modified a Makerbot 3D printer to make tattoos . What would it take to make a good…
The polymerase-chain reaction (PCR) is used to copy DNA, which is also known as amplifying it. It’s widely used in biology and medicine - pretty much anywhere DNA is analyzed or synthesized.
The Brother PE-150 is an old and affordable computerized embroidery machine. This kind of embroidery machine is pretty much just a sewing machine that can move the fabric around precisely according to instructions in a computer so the stitches it makes form predetermined patterns. It has a satisfying amber LCD screen with a touch interface. There are many different patterns that are baked into it,…
I spent the whole day just following my curiosity watching lectures and reading papers. If you take a look it’s probably just best to skim through and see if anything catches your eye. I saw a few interesting connections that I tried to highlight. The first three lectures are great overviews of the general recent big trends in robot intelligence. The drone lecture felt like a bit of a refreshing…