What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined! Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were like a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent? –Richard Feynman
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Drawing With Code
What does it even mean? I see two main ways of drawing with code: 1) going for a representation of a thing you have in mind, or 2) using an algorithm and elements of randomness to surprise you. Representational I have code-drawn Lissajous curves with code – from a picture in mind before I started.…
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On Descriptive Geometry
I keep forgetting I am writing for an international audience here! Having referred to Descriptive Geometry (DG) often, I doubt that everybody associates similar mental images with it. Anybody remembering the trace of a plane, for example? Learning about the history and culture of Descriptive Geometry, I realize it is rooted in a European tradition…
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Archaic Mathematical Art – and Poetry – from Code
What is the simplest way of creating art with code? I have been using software frameworks for mathematics and graphics in the past year. They “abstract away” how you actually place the dots on the virtual canvas. But I want something ancient, with a clear-cut boundary. My choice is the language C: created in the…
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Coping with the AI Apocalypse
Painstakingly, I was putting the finishing touches on my analog geometric art – when this video popped into several of my social media feeds: We Need To Talk About AI… by Cool Worlds Podcast Cool Worlds Podcast is run by a team at Columbia University and usually features guests interviewed by physicist David Kipping. This…
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Coffee-Powered Stargate
Let me open the Stargate of Diffraction for you, once again! This is as close as I ever got to a plain scientific visualization: No 3D effects, just the intensity of diffracted radiation as a function of position in space. If you use a sun catcher – a film with a diffraction grating – the…
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Rolling Not Slipping – Story of a Twirling Ellipsoid
I can’t help it – I use the first title that pops into my mind! “Rolling, not slipping” is the punchline of a mathematical argument used in classical mechanics, in the theory of the motion of a gyroscope. But I am not going to do it justice in this blog post (apart from a math…
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Futuristic T-Shirts for Physics Geeks!
Have I started the elkement.art fashion brand? I have been working on the series Poinsot’s Pixel Spaceship for ages. I have been thinking about releasing wall art, but then I tested a different product – the classical print-on-demand product: T-shirts. And THIS WAS IT! This is the perfect surface I want to print this spaceship-like…
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Unearthing a Time Capsule and Preserving a Fading Cathedral
My first creative endeavors (as an adult) were not drawings or paintings. It was the early web that made me pick colors by hand and stitch together HTML code snippets. The web of the early 2000s was a very different place from the modern social media era, built from many small independent sites and blogs,…
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elkement Art Spotted in the Real World!
“Modern and Traditional” This sounds like a clichéd slogan. But I cannot get it out of head when I see the photos a customer of my art store kindly has sent me! Digital art created with code (No AI) is as “modern” as it can get. When I initially thought about printing my art, another…
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Retention
“Retention” is the name I gave this painting, featuring the retention basin of our village: I am showing the paper still buckled from the water and the brushes still wet as I have just started learning watercolors more seriously. So, this is a “test”! In the next days I want to withdraw from the world,…
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Spinning Projection – a Tiny Canvas Print, a Long Time in the Making
These spheres and lines have been haunting me. I have been writing about stereographic projection so often – and created so much related geometrical art – that I created a blog post just for curating all the links to my own articles: Stereographic Retrospective. This year, I have created a series of six drawings of…
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Friendly Sparkling Alien Spaceships
I know, I am again using this metaphor! But once I saw the friendly alien spaceships in these images, I could not unsee them! There is more background information about these sparkling ellipsoid and spheres in my previous post. Today I only want to show you number 2 and 3 in this series of four…
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Saying Hello to New Subscribers and Introducing Poinsot’s Pixel Spaceship!
A bunch of you have signed up recently here or via my new store, or you started following this blog via platforms like Mastodon (in the Fediverse)! Thanks a lot for following elkement.art! I want to welcome you all and give you an overview of what to expect here! I have been blogging since 2012,…
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My Posts Escaped. And So Did I! Or: Math is My Blanket!
I did maintenance work on my blog, touching all the posts. As my blog is also a Fediverse instance needed to take great care that changed blogs did not get posted there again. Of course, some of them escaped, and I had to post – again – writing about this! I found a workaround to…
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LinkedIn Timeline Poetry: Are You Prepared to Own?
Today, I am finding poetry in the posts in my LinkedIn feed! I check out the first post in my feed and pick a short snippet of text without editing it. This becomes the first line of the poem! Only after the first line is cast in stone, I visit the next search result and…
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Hello to the Fediverse :)
Hello, people out there on Mastodon, Pixelfed, or whatever platform you use! You might have seen a weird collection of old posts reposted by my account today! Sorry :) This has been just me cleaning up minor stuff – not knowing that I have to turn off federation explicitly to avoid blasting out these old…
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Geometry of the Physics of the Gyroscope – on a Coffee Mug!
Construct the Labyrinth from Which You Plan to Escape … has been the motto of the Oulipo movement, French writers and mathematicians who have boosted their creative writing by imposing arbitrary constraints. I had practiced Oulipo long before I knew the term. I just called it Search Term Poetry or Spam Poetry. I have been…
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Rounded Brass Things
All the rounded things in our lives disappear. The red alarm alarm clock in your nightstand, waking you up with their jarring twin bells. The desk phone with its circular rotary dial and its harmonious ring tone. The elegant wall clock whose soothing ticking has been hypnotic. Merchant’s scales that seem to look at you,…
