Collective Landscaping

This one was a group activity, and I think it came out pretty good, in a random sort of way.

White Flash

Inverted Imagination Board

Interlocking Colour Wheel #1

Platform

I dreamed of a well crafted wooden platform, for sitting, where every time I sat on the wooden platform, I would be caused to remember my previous sittings, and to bring to life the statues of myself from on the wooden platforms of the past. I could not be alone with myself on the wooden platform, because I would be with my previous selves who are now not with me.

Holographic basis functions

What are holographic basis functions? we've seen holograms. They can be stored in crystals, and when you smash them into bits, the original hologram will be perfectly preserved in each crystal shard. Basis functions are less obvious. They are the elements of a configuration. For example, any waveform can be decomposed and perfectly described by a set of other waveforms, referred to as basis functions. Consider holographic basis functions. What could they possibly be, and why would anyone care. For one, you get holographic basis functions whenever a configuration can be perfectly described by smaller versions of itself. Holographic basis functions have a treelike structure. A tree, in some imperfect sense, is composed of smaller versions of itself. Hmmm, maybe trees are less holographic, and are perhaps more polygraphic, composed of idiosyncratic smaller trees that are not scaled downs replicas. It is interesting to wonder whether the thin veneer of reality is also composed of polygraphic basis functions, which could be thought of as selected parts of our experiences from the past; the polygraphic set of unique memories. How much of the past can we see when we stare into the present.

Uptree

Skywater

Colour Tree

Sky

balls on hills

Piano Garden

Just moved. Quaint house, lots of space, a big deck, and a little garden. Just enough room for me to dump the leftover hunk of my first piano. Most of my first piano was burned on the longest day of last year. Now, the remains are buried in my garden to make music with the worms. I've been video taping all of my plants every morning, and in a month or so, should have enough footage to fast forward the plant growth.

Central Images

I recommend watching the movie 'Solar Max'. Only a half hour or so long, the film captures many stunning images of the sun. Watching the movie, I found myself thinking back to an important theory in psychology, known in various forms as 'Instance theory'. The idea is simply that memory consists of multiple instances of previous experience. The implication is that currrent experience is a reconstruction, made on the basis of these stored instances, and that current experience is constantly being shaped by our history of instances. With this idea in mind, it is intesting to wonder about the role of particular instances in mediating the problem of communication: namely, given that we have many different instances of experience that are not common, how do we so often arrive at a point of common understanding. At some level, we are always sufffering from the illusion of succesful communcation. At the same time, although our experiences are idiosyncratic, the world is kind and regular and usually offers similar vantage points that facilitate communcation. The image of the sun is one of these potent regularities that people have shared throughout history. Solar max does a nice job of presenting these images for our indulgence. Google earth does the same thing. And, more recently, Google video is out there providing hords of 12 second clips of experience that we can all share (type in 'lady punch', or 'springboard', or 'tom cruise kills oprah', or see ' the best of google video project'. Won't the future be nice. Once the best experiences are all posted on Google video we can just sit around watching them. Aaa Google video. The centralizing frontier of common experiences.

Dream Master

I don't often have an image in mind when I get down to painting something. Usually, I am content to watch the colours appear on the canvas in whichever way seems most interesting at the time. However, this painting, which I usually call 'Dr.Zeuss land' was a preconceived notion. The image came to me one night during a dream. Just before going to bed I was thinking about dreaming, and struggling to understand the means by which I typically enter my dreamland. I was standing just outside my closed bedroom door, and I decided to make a proclamation, "I am the dream master". Then I opened the door, went to sleep, and started to float around Dr.Zeuss Land. When I woke up, I drew the image on a canvas, and then with my wobbly hands painted what remained. The image has no special significance for me, it was only an unusually clear vision that was easily preserved. Since then, I have tried controlling my dreams by calling myself the dream master. I have found little success in this approach, and now prefer the intangible falling part of going to sleep.

Waveforms

I've always been convinced that trees are interesting because they seem to be a collection of smaller trees, made up of smaller trees. Once, while in the Netherlands, sitting amongst a few trees and thinking about symmetry, I was enjoying the idea that tree roots are upside down tree branches, made up of more upside down tree branches. This is what I like about trees...they seem to grow out at you from every possible direction. With these ideas in mind, I have spent many hours doodling waveforms that capture some notion of tree-like structure. Although I have little technical proficiency in drawing, it seems that I can sometimes get around this problem by making drawings that have all kinds of redundant patterns. This way, replicating a bunch of incoherent patterns across a variety of scales may provide an illusion of coherency. For example, this waveform picture is made up of a bunch of leaf-like patterns, which are in turn made up of sine-like waves increasing in frequency as they move away from the centre of each leaf.

Masking

Let's try this out. These are a few masks that emerged recently from my sketchbook. The mask-drawing prrocess has lead down a few different thought paths. Most notably, after spending several hours drawing variations on these masks, and spending several days thereafter computing between-mask similarity scores for a style recognition model I've been pursuing, I started to notice masks just about everywhere. The feeling was subtle. But, I could see a mask when I closed my eyes. I could see masks hovering over people's faces on the bus. Occasionally, a momentary expression on a friend's face would immediately be replaced by one of my masks. All of these face-mask-substitution experiences were happening sometime in Feburary, 2006. Since then, I have used these masks in psychological tasks where participants rate the similarity between pairs of masks; these similarity scores are then compared against 'objective' measures of similarity derived from various multi-dimensional ways of parameterizing the entire set of masks. I've also created an algorithm that randomly splits the masks into smaller windows containing parts of the masks. Using this method I can create a very large set of mask-parts. It turns out that this large set of mask-parts can be used to reconstruct most digital pictures (kind of like a fourier analysis, only using parts of pictures). One last thing, while drawing these masks, it was interesting to think about the experience of boredom. At one point, probably on my 43rd mask, I approached the precipice of boredom, and was immediately intrigued by what my pen would have to draw next in order to maintain my fascination with the faint variations I was creating.