Forest Goddess Redux

Some more plays on the Forest Goddess / Forest Spirit theme - the hidden, sensed, almost seen:

Vajrayogini Glitches

Been playing around with some glitch FX techniques in Photoshop. Here are samples applied to a Vajrayogini image from my library of composited Buddhist figures.

The original composit image:

Bill Tavis has performed his fractal halftone mapping on my Tara / Dakini diptych resulting in a wonderful GIF animation. Thanks again!

You can read about the source artwork here: Tara Variations.

See more of Bill Tavis's stuff on his Tumblr.

Trippy Tara

Bill Tavis has performed his fractal halftone mapping on my COSM Tara piece resulting in a wonderful GIF animation. Thanks!

See more of Bill Tavis's stuff on his Tumblr.

Rite of Spring - Medicine Offering

Gif by Bill Tavis - tumbler site: http://billtavis.tumblr.com

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Wanted to give a 'shout out' to Bill Tavis's new project - a Kickstarter project for his Mandelmap poster.

From his tumblr: Now live! Go there now to receive a poster as a reward for pledging. Meticulously researched and compiled, this poster functions as a thought-provoking guide to the astonishingly complex Mandelbrot set. - http://kck.st/23HsEZW

Hand Trembling Way

So can you tell me how this image was made? It's a little bit analog low-tech for sure, making use of a "rescan" technique I learned from my Experimental TV Center lab days with the wobulator: The original image of hands in an "offering to the Earth" mudra is from a number of years ago,  and I've used this as an element in a number of finished pieces... A few years ago I processed the healing hands image thru the fun and fantastic Percolator iPhone app to create a range of visual processed output frames. These were combined into a GIF recently and then run thru a glitch app or two .(I forgot which ones, sorry!)  Finally, the resulting video was played back in a loop on an iPad and re-captured as a standard video with my phone. (Hence, playing with the angles allow me to get a foreshortened trapezoidal perspective...) I then reduced the HD video footage to a smaller frame size and GIF'd it - results below:

More Glitch Experiments - Glitched Forest Goddess

This is an experiment in creating a glitched forest goddess loop to be positioned 'under' (camouflaged by) leaves, flowers and other offering elements. See the accompanying static image (below anim) for an example of my Forest Goddess series from last year... Now imagine a more layered effect with the leaves (etc.) as the top layer, and one or more glitched figures as background layers. (I'll update this post with an example as soon as I have taken this to the next step...)

Media Totem

Been playing around with various glitch apps on my iPad. This experiment  using a found photo of Marilyn Monroe is a rather Pop Art in nature, eh? WWMMS? (What would Marshall McLuhan say?)

Springtime!

The energy is really starting to flow now! Everything is waking up. Spring bulbs blooming, trees leafing out, birds singing.

Gif by Bill Tavis - tumbler site: http://billtavis.tumblr.com

In Memory of Armand

It's hard to unexpectedly lose a long-time buddy, fellow artist, DIY craftsman, avid gardener, husband, father... Our thoughts are with your lovely wife and daughter.

Be well, my friend, on your journey.

Winter Glitch

Winter Glitch along the Hudson from Mark Gilliland on Vimeo.

A glitch test of footage from along the Hudson River.

Healing Hands glitch GIF

Been playing around with some glitch apps on my iPad, using basic glitch techniques including simple frame slams such as this one.

Auras galore! More TAVIS animations

Animations from Bill Tavis tumblr site: http://billtavis.tumblr.com

Luminancer - IOS APP

Old-school analog video image processing is alive and well in this APP call Luminancer - at least it appears to be 'analog' although it's actually digital magic. There are way too many "real time" adjustments one can make and record to fully describe this app. Take a look at this sample:

Luminancing in the Lake
We are continuing to test iO6 for stability. Please let us know if you see any issues. We're also very excited for the IPHONE 5. Bigger screen, higher resolution which means MORE LUMINANCING
Posted by Luminancer iOS App on Thursday, September 20, 2012

Here's the direct iTunes APP store link: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/luminancer/id414607139?mt=8

Happy New Year 2016

Deep Dreaming in Egypt

From an original artwork "Temple of Sekmet"

Pachamama Healing Mandala

This is the piece I am showing in the Blue Door Gallery's "Healing Arts" show. I thought that I would add an offering element to the Pachamama mandala image as a way to energize the space and create an awareness of shamanic healing ritual.

Alien Dreamtime #2

I fed another one of my original artworks - Inka Dreamtime - into neural processing by the Deep Dreamer Mac app, similar to the settings use in previous post. This is 100 levels of deep dream (the current maximum allowed).

Alien Dreamtime #1

I fed my original artwork Spiral Dreamtime into neural processing by the Deep Dreamer Mac app, testing one of the "Level 5" settings, and generating an animated zoom into the hallucination.

NOISEDIVE - more Deep Dreaming!

Noisedive from Johan Nordberg on Vimeo.

This is what emerges when you recursively feed noise to a artificial neural network trained to recognise places (e.g. you give it an image and the response is something like 90% beach , 20% desert, 2% swimming pool).

The familiar shapes you see floating past is abstractions the network has made for the different categories. Some categories feature more prominently because the amount of images used to train them differ. For example the "fountain" category contains 111,496 images compared to only 883 in the "nuclear_power_plant" one. So that's why you see a lot more fountain like shapes than big chimneys.

There's a lot more to it than that of course, and this visualisation only shows you one of the many abstraction layers the network uses.

Based on the work by Google researches Alexander Mordvintsev, Christopher Olah and Mike Tyka

Read more at Google Research Labs blog:

• http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2015/06/inceptionism-going-deeper-into-neural.html
• http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2015/07/deepdream-code-example-for-visualizing.html

Stoned Ape Theory

Anyone who has listened to Terence McKenna's recorded talks has probably heard a recounting of his version of the "out of Africa" human origins myth - in particular what caused the sudden growth of brain size, intelligence, self-awareness, social and artistic behaviors, language capabilities. Blame it on the mushroom! This short cartoon tells the story:

Silly Symphony - The Skeleton Dance

Famous skeleton cartoon made in 1929 by Disney.

Dreamtime Hiroshima

I came across this image processed thru a Deepdream filter - in honor of the souls lost during the two atomic bombs detonated over Japan in 1945. Let loose the dogs of war?

unprocessed

processed

Buddha Self via Dreamscope

More art images passed thru various Deep Dreaming filters. Interesting results.

Night Blooming Cactus

And now for something totally different - some GIFs of cactus blooming. Pollinated by bats or moths? Another sort of dreamtime.

Echinopsis enthusiast Greg Krehel has a knack for catching these blooming succulents in the act. Original posting from Colossal. With link to Vimeo movie of "best of" this year's bloom footage.

Forest Goddess Dreamtime

Here are some more images processed via the Dreamscope web interface (see previous posting for details). In this posting, I've selected some samples based upon images from the Forest Goddess / Pachamama series. The samples show a progression from heightened edge details to full blown crazy tripping.

Deep Dreaming Tara Mandalas

The Dreamscope site is another Deep Dreaming web interface for processing images. There's a selection of 15 filters (various pre-configured neural net levels and feedback settings)... This site is kind of fu and addictive in that it responds quickly and there are hardly any queuing / processing delays. (I wish the output wasn't limited to 800x600 however.)

I've been playing around with a number of images and filters. Interesting and often crazy stuff. Several results really stood out as being interesting without totally overwhelming the original image. Here is a set from the Tara Mandala series:

And here is one more from this Tara series that I thought was striking: