On Monday the 16th March, after leaving my camera at someone else’s house, twice, I was finally able to get out in the spring air and do a site survey of the area of Sugarwell Hill that interests me. Having gathered a lot of pictures of the available material, it soon becomes clear that there is a lot of rubbish on the site. My idea of a little peninsula of nature protruding into our urban domain is a romanticisation, and what’s really happening is an ongoing battle between nature and the endless tide of rubbish left by almost anyone that has anything to do with the place. it is the tragedy of the commons played out in the real world. lets look at some of that rubbish first before we go any further:

Broken glass

lots of this, some of it’s mirrored

Mirror glass

lots of the usual rubbish, ie drinks containers and junk food wrappers

Coke can

as well as plentiful evidence of the beverage of choice for the socially immobile

White Ace

Fly tipping is not a passtime for drunken entomologists by the way

Random Rubbish

There’s a real sadness about this, lost memories, and a bunch of questions: what happened? where are they now? doesn’t someone want this back?

Lost memories

one of the reasons for being here is to investigate the possibility of using on site materials for creative purposes. and already i see a potential picture frame

screen frame

or perhaps something to display that coveted Duchamp sketch

Seat

also plenty of pallette’s (see what i did there – art supplies geddit?!)

Half Pallette

also known as the ‘poor mans futon’

Palette crate

Pallette crate 2

however there’s still something for the more conventional ‘derelichte’

Mattress

actually, while we’re here, nice recursion

Mattress matrix

something from our ‘ready to wear’ line

abandoned clothes

in the automobile category we have at least three different car wheels

Wheel

as well as hub caps

hub cap

a liscence plate

number plate

and another unrelated plate

number plate 2

another wheel, of a different kind

steering wheel

something for that added spark

Car Battery

and so on

trailer

and so on

Reel

and then we get to the problem with plastic which is that it ends up everywhere

plastic swing

or this bit, whatever it is

random blue

in fact it’s the rubbish adding all the colour round here

red plastic

and what the hell is this?

happy face

and is it any relation to this guy

Wild Furby

He’d better be careful, it’s not safe to play around here

needle mushroom

and so we come to one of the most difficult aspects of dealing with the site

Medical suprise

besides the rubbish being bad for the environment and making the place unsightly, it’s also dangerous to handle.

By the time i had finished surveying the site and recording all the details (full set can be viewed here) it became apparent that the number one resource would be junk and reclaimed materials. It also became apparent that the most interesting and relevant story here is the untold one, the global one, of overwhelming pollution. So for me the brief has now concentrated down to ‘how can i use the rubbish of the site to tell people a story that addresses the problem, in a way that lets them know how special this place is’

at the moment i’m torn between to figurative sculptures, one where a little wickerman, animated by the sugar well, fights with a trash monster in a battle to the death, and one where it’s just the trash monster (again mythologically animated by the supernatural force of the sugar well), possibly watering  a bunch of daffodils. the reasons for doing this are:

easily available materials

materials don’t require special treatment, ie painting. they tell the story

doesn’t matter if the sculpture is destroyed – it’s going to have to be ephemeral and in all likelihood whatever goes up there will almost certainly be reduced to cinders overnight simply for not being ‘normal’

the matter seems to affect me as much as it does the ecology of the site.  i feel the connection and the desire to do something coupled with the frustration of being just one person. i am hoping that while making trash into a sculpture doesn’t solve the problem, maybe it will highlight in such a way as to bring it to the attention of those who can deal with it

so there are my researches and outcomes of the research. and if your very good, i might tell you the story of the trash monster. but that kids, is for another day…

On Sunday the 1st of february it snowed and carried on snowing into the night. It was the start of the ‘big freeze’ – an ordinary period of snowfall that sent the media into a minor frenzy. I was there and i can speak from experience and i’ve got the pictures to prove it, and I know this may be a heresy, but it wasn’t that bad imho. I went out at in the wee small hours and caught some nice snaps for a pano or two. It was also a good oppurtunity to try out a little experiment with something I saw on the internet but can’t find now.

This is a sort of triple threat post as well, because it covers the chance aspect of the snow, the panoramic photo’s, sugarwell hill and the ‘Site’ project, and a sort of impromptu anamorphic illusion:

halp!

ominable snowman

Snow prints are made by gently but firmly pressing yourself (or anything else i guess) against the snow so that it forms a 3D negative. most people, when presented with a decent 3D negative in the right light, will see the indent as an emboss, so to speak, and the face (or whatever) will appear real. In the yellowing light of a city awash with the diffuse light of snow reflected sodium bulbs these didn’t look particularly impressive, but the flash really pics them out in detail and gives you a better idea of how good the print is.

These have taken a while to publish ’cause I’m still not entirely happy with the sugarwell panorama at large scales:

Sugarwell Hill snow panorama

On my way back home i stopped at a nearby junction to catch it at it’s most tranquil:

Nassau Place snow panorama

a quick run through ‘polar co-ordinates’ gives us this:

snow planet Nassau Place

coming soon: Little planets tutorial and, by popular demand, an RSS tutorial.

And we’re back! Well, here’s the results of our classwork of the 25th february, as promised. Click on the pictures to go to the originals on Flickr. also be sure to check out the movie at the end of this post, which shows how it’s all done.

Firstly, there’s the Doodle i did the night before on my kitchen table (I like being a grown-up, it means there’s no-one to shout at you for ‘improving’ your own stuff):

anamorphic robot by AutoMattOn, on Flickr

robot revealed

On the day of the lecture/ workshop we looked at the work of some of the artists mentioned in my previous post before getting down to praxis and actually making our own.

First up, Jeremy and Simon offering us a tasty bit of furniture porn:

 

Boys will be boys...

Next up are Dawn and Ailsa and they want you to be absolutely under no illusions as to what it is you’re looking at:

This is sp-Art-aaaa!

Natalya, Anna and Alex birthed this celebratory piece:

Natalya, Anna and Alex by AutoMattOn, on Flickr"

and finally myself, Jayne and Joe went all out for a word and a shape combined:

Joe, Jayne and Matty

And you can watch the movie here:

And that’s that for anamorphism, I’m now off home for a nice cup of tea and choc and hazelnut cookie. 

…drawing, that is.

Nina Kane runs free life drawing workshops at the Leeds City Gallery.

I was lucky enough to attend one of Nina’s sessions last year and was greatly rewarded by the experience. When an email came round from Nina i was chuffed to get another chance to work with an energetic, inventive and devoted artist.

Bride of Theseus

Last years sessions were more freeform, and very fast paced, with most poses lasting a mere 15 minutes, so rather than try and crank out a masterpeice we were instead forced to focus on mood, expression and flow, just scratching it down and seeing what happens. The use of interesting materials as props as well as a situation free from some of the necessary formal boundaries of creating work for a brief meant i was able to elaborate a figurative drawing by extending into whinsy and the fantastical. I was very pleased with my own output, and felt my life drawing skills were enhanced by the event.

This year we seem to be going for a more in depth, studied approach. On arrival I was plunged into a an exercise that involved holding the ends of bamboo sticks, and using them as a medium with which to interact with the other participants. This allowed us to get into a shared vibe feel that reduced the sociual tension of being essentially in a group of strangers, without that awkward ‘I’m Matt and I’m here to improve my pastel skills’ sort of thing that I always hate and compulsively lie at anyway (‘I’m Matt and i’m only here because i’m hiding from the police right now…’)

Venus - Canova

The topic for the day was a beautiful marble statue called ‘The Hope Venus’, carved by Antonio Canova for a collector called Thomas Hope (actually, watch out for that last link. It states that Hope invented the Battenberg cake, which isn’t mentioned in the battenburg entry on wikipedia – a sure sign that there may be inaccuracies and further research may be required. Always check and double check your sources.) The model for the peice was Pauline Borghese (neé Bonaparte), Sister of the emporer Napoleon and Paris Hilton/Lindsey Lohan-A-Like of her time, as she spent her youth in a series of scandalous encounters and her latter years battling a number of gynocological ailments – hence, perhaps, the cloth clutched to her womb? And so Pauline, the details of her life, her relationship to Canova as the artist, her motivations as a renegade socialite (choosing to be represented as the comely Venus instead of the more chaste and traditional Diana) and the somatic language of the pose – the (…false…?) modesty, the cupped breast, the covered ears, the impossible neck position – become the motifs and riffs on which the session was focused. once we’d finished reviwing the peice, discussing it and learning about it in the gallery, assisted by a wealth of handouts, we adjourned to the education studio in the rear of the gallery for the drawing. Nina posed for an hour, which i spent focusing on a single drawing in pastel, chalk and charcoal on pink paper.

Venus De Smudge

So what have I learned? besides a wealth of informtion on a foxy aristocratic strumpet, I learned:

• Chalk and pastel don’t mix well – be careful when you fish those coloured sticks out of the tray.
• Framing – stop trying to get everything on a single peice of paper, focus on a single area instead and maximise attention to it.
• Colour – rather than picking up and using every colour you can find, focus down to just a few related tones (like orange and red in a light and dark shade in this case) and work with those. Then you should be able to avoid making a psychaedelic pudding of a drawing.
• Colour again – be careful when laying down the darker colours, mistakes can be hard and pointlessly time consuming to correct.
• Faces – like picasso i know where all the peices are meant to go, putting them there is a different matter. partly this relates to the point about framing to give yourself more space to work, but mostly this is about using practice and thourough observation to overcome the existing shortfall of consumate skill.

On the upside i renewed my love of chalk and charcoal somewhere in the process of trying to capture the cloth. The soft powdery nature is easy and pleasant to work with, so much can be done with careful smudging. the shape  of the white helps enhance the legs and gets the figure out of the background whilst giving her a space within which to ‘work’.

After the workshop i had a moment to notice there’s new stuff up in the gallery, namely an exhibition on rank, featuring the Mark Titchner peice ‘No Them, Only Us’ (who I first stumbled accross last year on a trip to the Baltic) as well as a wealth of thought provoking stuff (see what i did there? wealth? see…)

well, i got a bit art-geeky there, so i’m off for a brew and a slice of Battenburg…

That's Leeds alright!

My chosen site is Sugarwell Hill, in particular a scrap of land that nestles in the ‘V’ between Scott Hall Road and Buslingthorpe Lane which offers a pretty fine view of the north east of Leeds city centre.

If you Zoom in to GoogleMaps you can see circles in the grass where the tethered horses graze. occasionally, if i remember, I take an apple with me and feed them a half each.

View Larger Map
A number of images of Sugarwell Hill are available on Leodis.net, whilst the natural environment is recorded on leeds.gov. According to this site the hill is the site of a clear natural spring said to never run dry and taste exceptionally sweet, hence the name. It is also mentioned briefly here. Twin sisters Maureen and Margaret Dixon clearly remember bombs being dropped on the site in world war II. The Pins and Needles section of the Leeds Tapestry depicts a painting by Alphonse Douseau circa 1840 featuring windmills on the hill, and from personal experience I can vouch that it’s a very good place to catch the wind. Of course any curious leodensian would do well to visit Secret Leeds where i was able to find a number of brief references. The most interesting of these, if you believe the stories, is to a skirmish in meanwood valley during the civil war, after which two burial mounds were erected for those killed in the fighting, one on the hill and another on the other side of the valley.

Beggar by Mark Jenkins

My first initial idea was to make human figures out of wire and second hand clothes, similar to the street installations of Mark Jenkins, fill them with earth and seeds and then as spring progressed they would become a mass of shoots and greenery culminating in a flowers and then going to seed before dying away in the harsh cold of the winter as the year progressed. A photo-a-day stop motion would give a visual effect similar to the end scene of Darren Aronovsky’s ‘The Fountain’ or the dream sequence in “Clyde Bruckman´s Final Repose” (episode 4, season 3 of the X-Files or “the tenth greatest episode in television history” according to american magazine TV Guide. personally i’d rate it higher than that), where a psychic man dreams of his own death and decomposition.

However I’m also considering other options, for instance making an image that would be visible from space or show up on web mapping services that use aerial photography by either sowing grass seeds of a slightly different coloured strain, or by lacing the top soil with something harmless that might alter the pH, like rust or lye for instance, and therefore alter the colour tint of the grass and plants, sort of like a large stencil.

How about this – Andy Goldsworthy’s ‘Rivers and Tides’ is on google video. watch it if you’ve got an hour and a half to spare. you will be deeply rewarded, despite the poor quality

TWOK

and so I am led to another idea, which is to return to the site and study the naturally occuring media there – stones, plants, litter, the occaisional burnt out stolen car – and from that, craft something that is reflective of the history and possible future of the surroundings, whilst remaining simple, aesthetic and relatively vandal proof.

Finally I should mention that last year, on my way to college I was lucky enough to spot some wild deer that must have presumably wandered all the way down the green corridor of Meanwood Valley from Golden Acre Park. I occasionally have dreams where I encounter the magical and I am always disappointed when I wake up and I am not clutching an alien artefact, the plans for a working time machine, or a real life honest to god leprechaun. So I’m immensly glad I managed to snap this photo at the time:

Spot the deer

Todays lesson is on anamorphosis, and is divided into 2 parts. the first part consists of research and a gathering of all things to do with eye trickery. the second part will show how our practical experiments of last thursday went.

Anamorphosis is the fancy name for using forced perspective to create ‘tromp l’oeuil’ illusions of an image. Well it’s easier seen than explained, as this page proves, which goes a bit deep into the maths for me. Fortunately the maths can be done for us by computers, if you want to go that far. if not, check out this gallery of real world anamorphosis. (incidentally, anamorphosis.com led me on to the site of Andrew Crompton, which has many fascinating tesselations, optical illusions and other brain bending stuff)

so, explanations out of the way, lets do a name check:

Holbein – a “one-off” who developed his own style and seemed able to turn his hand to almost anything, be it designing tableware or portraiture. however that skull looks photoshopped to me, what do you reckon?

The Ambassadors

Erhard Schon – Slightly more famous for hiding Charles V, Ferdinand I, Pope Paul III and Francis I in a painting, this one has a slighly more risqué theme:

Was siehst du ?

George Rousse – Paints geometric shapes that coalesce when you stand at a particular point in the room/building (A dedicated flickr stream is a good indicator of an artists popularity.) George is currently embroiled in this (warning: over-exuberant web design ahead), however on my inter-travels I found this video on a french art site, in which George is featured about halfway through. I mention it here because it also mentions Richard Serra, of Tilted Arc fame, which is relevant to our current ’site’ brief – i digress. George Rousse work looks like this:

Seoul, 2000

Mac Adams – Occaisionally makes sculpture that uses negative space or the interplay of shadow and light to create the illusion of form. like this:

Sculpture 2, 1999

Tim Noble and Sue Webster -Again, interplay of light and shadow transform an otherwise seemingly ordinary pile of rubbish. Particularly clever way of upcycling waste into art, (so familiar territory for the saatchis then):

Dirty White Trash (with gulls)

Shigeo Fukuda – Also in a similar vein to Noble and Webster but far more diverse, Fukuda is expert at illusion, anamorphosis and transformations. there are some very informative videos here or check out this wild piano:

Mirror Piano

Samuel Van Hoogstraten – Dutch painter, studied under rembrandt and went through a series of styles in trying to find his own. Experimented with tromp l’oeil effects and illusion, for instance with his perspective boxes which confined the viewers vision so as to make the sensory deception more convincing:

A Peepshow

Istvan Orosz -Another multi-talented individual. occaisionally uses the pseudonym ‘Utisz‘ (‘no-one’) – “Utisz – It was the Homeric hero Odysseus, who fought the Cyclops, had used this name, and had put out the monster’s eye. I imagine that poster is nothing else but an Odysseus’ gesture: some kind of attack upon the eye”. So prepare to have your eye attacked:

Crossroads

Jean Francois Niceron – Mathematician who authored ‘la perspective curieuse’ which is probably the most significant work on anamorphosis. He developed geometric rules in order to formalise the process mathematically:

plotting anamorphosis

Julian Beever – probably the most well known anamorphic artist on the net.

Batman

also in a similar vein:

Anthony Gormley – Generous technical description of creation of ‘Quantum Cloud’

also, from the legendary somethingawful.com ‘not photoshopped’ thread (Warning: off colour banter, off-topic posts, naughty words etc) this:

Eyes Lies and Illusion Hayward Gallery 2004

Well, i’m starting to see things that actually are there, which means it must be time for bed. Join us next post as we get all ‘ker-azy’ with electrical tape

Who doesn’t like M C Escher? what no? then you’ll have to leave right now I’m afraid, because todays experiment is all about the Droste Effect, a visual technique occaisionally used by the aforementioned dutch head-shredder mathmatician and printer, but digitally pioneered, popularised and perfected  by Josh Summers . His Droste Flickr set in particular blows my mind into little tiny but brilliantly coloured pixels. (Check out the chessboards…)

check out my Yoda Furby

I followed his posted tutorial and although quite pleased with the results i was sure there was more too it, especially as his later work has many more complex elements. So i waded through the comments (frequent and helpful replies are always a good sign) and got a bit more involved.  So here is a little tutorial based on my research:

You need some software first, namely the latest version of the GIMP , GTK , the latest version of Mathmap for windows and version 1.2.0 of the mathmap.exe , which we’re going to use to revert mathmap back to when it still played nicely with Josh’s latest script – version 10, which you will also need. you may also like to get this script from Lorenzo Marchi , which is a simpler droste effect but using straight old feedback recursion rather than getting all funky with the spirals.

Installation

1. Install the Gimp and GTK, and then install Mathmap.

2. Go to C:\Documents and Settings\*your name here*\.gimp-2.6\plug-ins and replace mathmap.exe with the 1.2.0 version.

3. I had some problems so i double bagged it by then copying everything in the above folder to C:\Program Files\GIMP-2.0\lib\gimp\2.0\plug-ins .

Image Preparation

4. Now photograph yourself/significant other/partner in crime holding a picture frame. Allow plenty of space all round when framing the shot as we’re going to be cropping it down. when you’ve got your shot transfer it over to your computator.

mine looks like this:

Tat Club

5. Open the image manipulation program of your choice, either P’shop or the Gimp and erase to tranparency the area that will become the ‘frame’ so you get something like this:

cropped and ready

(I’m really new to GIMP so like Josh i did it in photoshop. if you’re not sure check out his tutorial step 1.)

6. Save as a .PSD file.

The Fun Part

7. Fire up the GIMP and open your PSD.

8. In the dropdown menus go to Filters>generic>mathmap>mathmap .

9. Mathmap should open 2 windows, one full of computery looking code stuff -ignore this unless things are going wrong- and a friendlier looking regular interface. in the interface go to the settings tab and uncheck ‘auto preview’.

10. In the expressions tab delete the existing filter code then replace it by copying and pasting the Droste version 10 code into the expressions tab. get no more or less than everything from ###… to …end. copy it straight from the webpage. don’t paste it into notepad thinking your going to save the script somewhere and then copy that into mathmap because notepad screws up carriage returns and this will in turn screw up mathmap.

11. Click ‘Preview’ and after about 20 seconds you should get a picture that looks almost right.

11a. Power tip: click the ’save as…’ button at the bottom of the expression tab and give the script a name, like ‘Droste_v-10′. Then next time you do a droste pic it will be listed in the examples tab of mathmap.

12. Almost right is no good so we need to do some tweaking. go to the ‘User Values’ tab, which will now have filled with all sorts of interesting sliders and checkboxes. Make one adjustment at a time, previewing as you go, until you get something your happy with. here’s some tips for where you should be messing adjusting, in this order:

Outer Radius: defines the edge of the picture. I found bringing it down to 97 helped keep things tidy.

Inner radius: helps mathmap find the ‘frame’. around 40 is a good ball park figure. black areas are bad and if you see them you need to set you’re inner radius higher.

Zoom and Rotate: help fine tune positioning. you want to avoid having the outer ‘tail’ of the spiral visible. for me these ended up around 17 for zoom and 11degrees for rotation. ymmv.

Xcentershift and Ycentershift: tell mathmap where the centre of your ‘frame’ is. negative values of X will move the centre point left, positive – right. negative values of Y will move the centre down, positive – up. I think…

X shift and Yshift: moves the overall image, use these to line the whole composition up.

I’ll leave the rest to your curiosity.

13. When you’re happy hit OK and it will make the changes. after a couple of minutes you should have a pretty nifty looking picture.

14. File>’save as..’ in GIMP and click ’select filetype by extension’ and jpeg, then save that crazy sucka.

15. make a cup of tea, you deserve it. I had a lemon crunch cream with mine because i like regular crunch creams (sort of a rich mans custard cream) and the lemon variety were on offer.

This is just the basics but it should get you started. It’s definitely got me thinking about framing my shots when i’m out and about in a whole new way. and googling for mathmap scripts could turn up some fun stuff.

Finally thanks must go to Math-Art for finding and sharing.

Ciao

lets kick off with something from last year: Panoramic Movies

No Expense Spared

After spotting this on YouTube I decided to have a go myself. I’ve already had some fun making HiDef panoramas using Autostitch (which i will show off here at some point soon) and had thought about making movies by stopmotioning together panoramas, but this launched me into a new avenue entirely:

First test on a tripod in my front room. Music is ‘A Mother’ by the Herbalizer

Second test in my local park. music is by 3YE (that’s me in another incarnation) first tune is a remangling of  ‘Skin Deep’ which was used for Loreal’s ‘Touch of Pink’ adverts and I felt compelled to subvert. this is not a new idea and is admittedly pinched from the ever chipper Deathboy. the second, more excitable number is ‘h3YEker’. The light is poor because it was midwinter and the sun was setting.

Some online tutorials that helped me with the more technical aspects:

turning captured footage into a series of images for batch processing in the image editing software of your choice

automating photoshop for batch processing of an image sequence

the process:

1. tape a pencil to your video camera and bluetack a bauble to the end of the pencil. the bauble should line up with the centreline of the camera lens and you should zoom the camera onto the bauble so that the top and bottom edges just about line up. you will also need to set your camera to manual focus otherwise you will get great footage of the surface of the bauble and not much else

2. go wander around somewhere, filming as you go. experiment with different angles and putting the camera through gaps

3. capture or import the video into your computator

4. render that video as an image sequence

5. open the first image in the sequence and start recording your actions in P’shop. crop it down to just the bauble, then apply the polar cordinates filter in such a manner as to ‘unwrap’ the circlular bauble reflection into a rectangle. save that rectangle and then stop recording your actions

6. create the droplet from the action, as per the tutorial mentioned above,  and then drop the whole folder with the image sequence in onto the droplet.

7. now go have a nice hot cup of tea while P’shop munches it’s way through the bazillion images in the sequaence. i’d also recommend Ginger Nuts for dunking at this point. They’re solid performers, holding a good amount of tea before melting, and the ginger will give you a bit of extra zing for the rest of the days activity

8. When the ’shop is done, import the first of your new image sequence back into Vegas. vegas will recognise that it’s one of a bunch and supply a tick box for importing the whole lot as if it was a single media file. nice

9. rotate, crop, stretch to fit or whatever you please to get a satisfying end result and export.

I should also mention a little word on aspect ratios as panoramas make very good viewing for widescreen (my first run was right before Youtube introduced widescreen, the second right after, i felt compelled to make the best use of this innovation) basically, you should still output in your regular format of preference (mine’s PAL/DVD because it’s slightly bigger and slightly better than NTSC and because i live in blighty) but changing the pixel aspect ratio to a wider setting will avoid the problem of the black bars which you see in the first video (wasted data, wasted screen real estate), and ensuring you get a good full screen output whatever the medium

will that do you?

M@