Here you can see a couple of pages from "Perspectiva Corporum Regularium" (1568), a book full with perspective drawings of polyhedra by German Renaissance goldsmith Wenzel Jamnitzer. It already has been a couple years since I’ve found this book and wanted to make the forms in real life ever since. This year I got the chance to finally realize this project.
The more I inspected these forms, the more I started to notice. What their base is based on, each form having multiple geometric shapes, edges from those different shapes blending into each other, and so on... By dissecting these forms I started to like some more than I would've thought.
Here are two examples that became my favorite:
The base of this form is made out of 8 equilateral triangles, which form an octahedron. And each of the 4 sides have an extra 180 degrees mirrored triangle, that forms 4 hexagrams.
Not knowing all the geometric names by hard, it took me a while before seeing that this form is actually a dodecahedron. The triangles that form the tetrahedrons have some indents, but if you look closer, those indents are made out of the lines of the smaller isosceles triangle and those lines keep going further to the bigger triangle. The two outer outer lines of the two isosceles triangles are connected by a line in a right angle from the smaller one.
I wouldn't have figured out each angle and ratio of sizes without the 3D modeling app uMake. These past months I have been learning 3D modeling using this app and slowly it's becoming one of my favorite tools to design and sketch sculptures in 3D.
Here you can see my preparations and one of the 3D model from my upcoming project Acoustics Based on Jamnitzer. Next month I will be ordering the material, but for now I’m still finishing the last 3D models and contemplating whether I will create them in aluminium or cortensteel.
With some spare days before the new exhibition "electric poetry" in the Albert van Abbehuis I've been asked for, I took the chance to create a bigger case for my eurorack system and finish the 4 oscillators I still had to finish. This will be the first time that I exhibit this installation for more than just a couple of days. This means I have to create a system that is easy to turn on by somebody other than myself and also to have compositions long enough not to get boring after just a short period.
Here you can see the building process of the oscillators:
I saw some other cases made from aluminium and this would be a perfect fit for with my installation. I used aluminium with 2mm thickness and made it the same size as the stand I already made before for the installation. What took the most time was sanding it. I wanted to do it the same way as I did the forms for my installation so it would have the same look. I sanded it with three different sanding papers, starting with a rough one and finishing it with fine sanding paper.
Here are some pictures of the process:
Here is some documentation of the exhibition at the Albert van Abbehuis. Normally I play more drone or melodic sounds through the forms, but because this is an exhibition just for sound-art, I chose to emphasize the objects own characters. By repeating pulses of different frequencies I hope the audience has a better change of hearing the differences between the forms. On different exhibitions I like to use the forms as instruments and perform with them.
After finishing the objects for my graduation work, I wanted to tryout my new modular synth instead of using Max/MSP. Eventhough Max provides unlimited possibilities, so to speak, I still wasn't completely happy with the sound. Somehow I still prefer having real buttons and knobs. Here I'm trying out some different patches to make some drone and percussive sounds.
Lately I've been thinking a lot about how visuals are almost always 2 dimensional. Most times it's a beamer on a wall or 3d-mapped on fixed objects. How could I make visuals that are really in the space, that really have a changing form? How could I make it 3 dimensional?
Here is the beginning stage and test model that came out of this thought. Also with cymatics in the back of my head, I made this instrument that creates light and sound. Where the light is reacting to the sound. (In this video it's still without the sound part.)
I put two hemispheres on top of each other with a light exactly in the middle. The idea would be to put a transducer on the bottom and moving the two hemispheres from each other to change the light and sound.
Together with Nicole Urban I created a huge inflatable squid made out of plastic. We were commissioned together with other people from the Besturing to do the stage decoration for SubMarine Festival, which would take place at the Besturing. The plastic was molten together with an iron. On the night itself we used a beamer to project visuals on our squid.
My first tryout videomapping on the course Projection at ArtScience Interfaculty.
At some point also with multiple beamers, but unfortunately don't have any
documentation of it. I was using Resolume Avenue together with MadMapper.