weeknotes: poster, crystals

Crit day happened on Monday, and it went fine! I also saw Autechre, and played a Live Code Boston show!

Creating with Nature poster

I’m also organizing a talk series and needed to make a poster for it. I used the leaf cell system, but instead of growing veins, I used a font as the veins. As another little trick, I have the veins pull the brightness out of the cells, which makes the type stand out.

These were my “smoothest lines”, but I tried all of the tricks I know about to reduce pixels, but argh, it is still sometimes quite noticeable. Someday I’ll have sharp, thin, bright, slanted things that aren’t pixelated. Maybe I’ll have to make something physical instead.

Vision in Neuroscience

One of my classes had a group assignment to present some concepts on how the vision system processes time. I made some looping GIFs to represent the concepts.

For simultaneity, I randomized the phase offset of each pixel, except for the “simultaneous” ones that would all blink together. Contiguity was having one row set its phase based on the x-location. Contingency was to flash an outline preceding the event (I also had to reduce the number of pixels, or else it was hard to tell!)

Looking at material science to understand crystals

Since I’m finishing up some projects, I wanted a new coding project. I still need to try making things based on rocks, so I started some light research.

I ended up finding the Wulff construction from this video about bismuth, which was an interesting way to represent the shape a crystal would take on. I also always love a polar graph. I also learned apparently you can measure the surface energy of different slices by comparing the surface tension of different liquids? But despite an interesting chart, I couldn’t track down a database of them, and it started to seem like more trouble than my older ideas.. So I’m back to the idea of using a point group and then slicing different faces to capture crystal-ish behavior.