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It is not the ideas we do not have that block our thinking but the ideas we already have. — Edward de Bono This week — after finishing Catch-22 by Joseph Heller — I started reading Edward do Bono's How to Have a Beautiful Mind. I was first introduced to de Bono by my friend Adam Todd many years ago via The Six Thinking Hats which we used in many meetings to great effect back when I was Creative Director of a design agency. Since then I've always been keen to constantly explore different ways of…
There's a great future in plastics. Think about it. Will you think about it? — Mr. McQuire, The Graduate. In order to further explore the 3D printing of the Descendants series, I added a new 3D printer to the studio in the form of an Elegoo Saturn Ultra 16K. Having owned a PLA printer since 2010 with the original Makerbot and then the Replicator 2, an SLA based printer was a new excursion for me. With SLA printing the post-process is a lot more involved: wash, remove supports, cure but once you…
Pause.
It's good to revisit things to find hidden treasures — Laurie Anderson This sentence from Laurie Anderson, said whilst taking part in In Between Days really stuck with me. I've often said look again at the scraps on the cutting room floor which has the same sentiment — how we can sometimes be too quick to disregard things because we think they are mistakes or errors. And so this week I found myself revisiting Descendants my imagined digital robot collection from 2024 — a sold-out edition of 256…
Charles taught me that the beauty of being hands-on is that you get to make all the choices and move at your own pace — Llisa Demetrios talking about Charles Eames This weekend saw the inaugural edition of In Between Days, a two-day online symposium about creativity, technology and change presented by Anamorph and Chance Operations and sponsored by Field Notes. It was only a few weeks ago that Gary and I started to talk about what this event could be, and why it was needed, and so it was…
One wanted, she thought, dipping her brush deliberately, to be on a level with ordinary experience, to feel simply that's a chair, that's a table, and yet at the same time, It's a miracle, it's an ecstasy. — Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse I've always been struck by the incredible way Woolf talks about the seemingly ordinary everyday, almost at a subatomic Quantum level. Reading To the Lighthouse only cemented that opinion, originally formed when I first read The Waves, which still remains my…
Here she could lie for half a day undistracted, holding pleasant and incomplete conceptions in her mind – almost in her hands. They were scarcely clear enough to be called ideas. They had something to do with fragrance and colour and sound, but almost nothing to do with words. She was singing very little now, but a song would go through her head all morning, as a spring keeps welling up, and it was like a pleasant sensation indefinitely prolonged. It was much more like a sensation than like an…
Monday morning saw us head to the airport bound for Düsseldorf for the Beyond Tellerrand conference where I had created all the graphic design for the event which was celebrating its fifteenth anniversary. The feeling of this conference is like nothing else — which has everything to do with how much Marc Theile cares about the event — and it's always a place to catch up with friends we haven's seen for a while. The posters — created using a system I had made in Touch Designer — looked good and…
This week was spent finishing the titles for the upcoming Beyond Tellerrand conference, adding the music created by Tobi Lessnow. I also started playing with the Filter POP which Sarv released for free. As he points out, this is very much the missing operator from the POP family, allowing you to create time based transitions of any POP attribute all on the GPU. It works brilliantly and allowed me to add some nice tweens for some of the UV and texture displacement stuff I had been working on. On…
After picking up an original 1977 pressing of The Strangler's debut album Rattus Norvegicus from my local record shop, it got me thinking why I always try and seek out the original rather than a reissue. Whilst it's true that reissues can sometimes be a better pressing, I think it comes down to having the object that first appeared at that moment in time, and how — like the idea of a stub in Gibson's The Peripheral — culture then splintered onto a different path because of this punctuated…
A quick post to show a technique I use to create organic like lines in Touch Designer using POP operators. I won't go into every step but you can download the .toe to see how it works. Essentially it involves creating a grid of points, using a noise POP to play with the layout of these points then using a connectivity POP set to spiral per plane to create a line through these points. I then do a resample to give me some more points then a line smooth a couple of times to make the shape more o...
Schubert’s imagination was unusually literary. Words released music in him: poems about desire, love, loss, solitude, the longing for rest; narrative ballads; philosophical poems; theological poems; poems about death; poems about nature; poems about the paranormal. Butter wouldn’t melt That passage in the LRB about Franz Schubert further enhanced my strong-held belief how our imaginations are best fuelled when reading on a variety of subjects and styles. I don't mean reading on a device —…
I started the week playing around with some strange attractors. Kate Ertmann wrote a great post about the beauty of strange attractors, and they're something I've always been fascinated by, having previously created various modules in Houdini and now playing around with them in Touch Designer.
We’re currently experiencing some issues setting up the Google Meet call, so we’ll be hosting the meeting on our platform, Riverside instead. — Scammer Alarm bells rang loud and clear when I got this message just before I was due to have a call with a company who wanted to talk about commissioning me for an installation in New York. As soon as I read those words, were they suggest installing special software to just have the call, I did some more digging and discovered their domain was slig...
