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| Forest Goddess 03 |
9.26.2018
Forest Goddess Animation Tests
Last year I started to play around with animation of the obscuring leaves which hide the goddess, (Based upon one image from the Forest Goddess 03 series below).
9.25.2018
Hidden Nature
After working on the Forest Goddess series, I began to think about visibility / invisibility and it occurred to me that the jungle environment could provide another impenetrable screen, helping to conceal hidden things not quite obvious, dream-like, perhaps secret. And of course, the jungle is a realm of shamanic practice - the realm of ancestors, plant and animal spirits, ayahuasca visions.
I set about creating a leaf 'screen' based upon iconic jungle foliage. I wanted to make this leaf pattern repeating so I could tile a number of such blocks together into a larger panoramic aspect ratio. In this process, the adjacent and overlapping leaves began to form symmetrical totemic / figurative forms. The impact was similar to Rorschach inkblots.
If you look carefully (in the enlarged images) you may begin to resolve images of figures and animals concealed in the jungle.
I set about creating a leaf 'screen' based upon iconic jungle foliage. I wanted to make this leaf pattern repeating so I could tile a number of such blocks together into a larger panoramic aspect ratio. In this process, the adjacent and overlapping leaves began to form symmetrical totemic / figurative forms. The impact was similar to Rorschach inkblots.
If you look carefully (in the enlarged images) you may begin to resolve images of figures and animals concealed in the jungle.
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| Jungle Panorama 01 |
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| Jungle Panorama 02 |
Like any Rorschach image, your interpretation of what you see represents a shifting understanding / vision based upon a mix of cultural indoctrination, personal dreams, phobias, emotions, etc.
As a viewer embodying a more traditional 20th Century Western mindset, the jungle is dark, all-encompassing, unknown, unspeakable: it is the "Heart of Darkness" to be avoided, symbolizing a potentially life-threatening path into danger, loss of self, even madness.
For other viewers who embrace the 21st Century "archaic revival," this Western view of the jungle as something to be feared and avoided is 're-coded' with an indigenous world view full of respect, awe, and mystery. It can be a place of healing, self-discovery, and revelation.
As a viewer embodying a more traditional 20th Century Western mindset, the jungle is dark, all-encompassing, unknown, unspeakable: it is the "Heart of Darkness" to be avoided, symbolizing a potentially life-threatening path into danger, loss of self, even madness.
For other viewers who embrace the 21st Century "archaic revival," this Western view of the jungle as something to be feared and avoided is 're-coded' with an indigenous world view full of respect, awe, and mystery. It can be a place of healing, self-discovery, and revelation.
Hidden Nature #3
The most current jungle landscape in this series is built up from panels of two sizes with various background leaf patterns that can be re-arranged (like lines in poetry stanza: ABBAABBA) to allow reconfiguration of the work. It would also allow the piece to "wrap around" corners in an exhibition space. Reminds me of James Rosenquist's F-111 wall painting.
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| Jungle Panorama 03 |
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| CU: left side |
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| CU: right side |
1.13.2017
More Glitch Tests
I wanted to play around with a larger, more complex image to apply the various glitch processing upon. I chose a Jewel Tree image as the base with the following results:
This is the original unmodified image:
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:
The original composit image:
1.10.2017
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.
You can read about the source artwork here: Tara Variations.
See more of Bill Tavis's stuff on his Tumblr.
12.20.2016
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.
See more of Bill Tavis's stuff on his Tumblr.
4.19.2016
Rite of Spring - Medicine Offering
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| Gif by Bill Tavis - tumbler site: http://billtavis.tumblr.com |
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
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.
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| Gif by Bill Tavis - tumbler site: http://billtavis.tumblr.com |
3.14.2016
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.
1.21.2016
1.16.2016
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.
1.04.2016
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:
Here's the direct iTunes APP store link: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/luminancer/id414607139?mt=8
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
8.17.2015
8.14.2015
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:
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:
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