randomosity

MOMA Elastic Mind

There was a time when the the bril­liant illu­min­ated manu­scripts of Irish Mon­as­ter­ies rep­res­en­ted the pas­sion­ate col­lec­tion of the works of the sol­it­ary monk/artisan/craftsman. The intric­ate knot pat­terns are a study in a real pat­tern lan­guage. Years ago, when my cre­at­ive juices were sought a middle ground between a clear sys­tem­atic approach and yearn­ing to find break out of these same sys­tems, I dis­covered the work of George and Iain Bain. — father and son. The elder Bain made a life­time study of find­ing the pat­terns in the knot­work and devis­ing tech­niques to allow oth­ers to appre­ci­ate these and to rep­lic­ate these celtic mas­ter­works for them­selves. His son built on these tech­niques to devise a an even sim­pler way of cre­at­ing the ela­bour­ate designs. I was hooked and pro­duced some large scale knot pat­terns. I also dis­covered the won­der of dood­ling in square and tri­an­gu­lar knot pat­terns. At one point I even delved into zoomorph­ical celtic art­work and dic­sov­ered and even lar­ger challenge.

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Lay­out Engine Geometry

Ran­dom Numbers

Water­sheds as Unbreak­able Space

Faced with find­ing a place to live in Dub­lin, I decided to quickly attempt to cre­ate a mashup of poten­tial prop­er­ties mapped through­out the city. This is, I sense, an increas­ingly com­mon sort of mashup. But when I did a quick scan, I couldn’t find any­thing that accom­plished this for the area I wanted. Yes, you could plot each place manu­ally in either the My Maps sec­tion of Google Maps or cre­ate a KML over­lay for Google Earth. Viable, but I wanted a tool that would allow the list to be dynam­ic­ally gen­er­ated and cap­ture the list cur­rent to when I was look­ing at it. I would note that many sites have their own spa­tial dis­plays, and there are a lot of mashups involving craigslist, but none for me and the Dub­lin scene. The site I was using to look for rental oppor­tun­it­ies is daft.ie. It’s got a great search engine, and it will map your selec­tions on a rental by rental basis, or will present all (unfiltered) list­ings in the area of the list­ing you have chosen. You can addi­tion­ally select a par­tic­u­lar agency and have their list­ings plot­ted on a Google Map, but this was not quite what I wanted. My object­ive was to cre­ate a cus­tom search, take the detailed res­ults, identify the loc­a­tion, geo­code it, and then pipe it into Google Maps. In concept simple — in prac­tise sub­ject to the vagar­ies of daft and the tools used.

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As I was wan­der­ing to the whole food store tonight I heard the dron­ing of an air­craft I couldn’t identify. There was the beat of a heli­copter blade, but I could identify the comingled drone of a heavy engine. Then as the sounds grew closer a huge Ford Tri-motor roared over the trees a block away. The Tri-motor was cruis­ing at no more than 1000ft accom­pan­ied by a heli­copter shoot­ing video. It was an amaz­ing sight. The sun was at a lovely even­ing height giv­ing a won­der­ful orangey ambi­ence, the sky clear and I was trans­por­ted to another era. I was drawn back to a time when an air­plane was the nov­elty (rar­ity) that the Tri-motor is today. What would it have been like to have seen this virilely power­ful metal beast soar­ing over a small town bring­ing the hope/promise/threat? of a faster com­mu­nic­a­tion and trans­port? The sheer size and mech­an­ical won­der must have inspired an awe even more sub­stan­tial than my serendip­it­ous amaze.

The heli­copter buzz­ing about the lar­ger ship seemed like a hawk being men­aced by a spar­row or two. Espe­cially as another heli­copter came shoot­ing across the sky­line head­ing in for a closer look as well. I will have to find out where the mag­ni­fi­cent beast was head­ing. A new addi­tion to the Cana­dian War­plane Her­it­age at the air­port per­haps. Given that only 18 are known to still exist, I was blessed with a rare exper­i­ence tonight.

Fractal Fur­niture

France as Utensil