maths
William James
“The union of the mathematician with the poet, fervor with measure, passion with correctness, this surely is the ideal.”
Philip Glass – Geometry of Circles (Sesame Street) (1979)
“”Geometry of Circles” is a series of unnumbered animation pieces created for Sesame Street in 1979. Cathryn Aison commissioned Philip Glass to write music for animation based on her storyboard which had been submitted to and approved by Edith Zornow of CTW.
The shorts consist of the movement of six circles (each with a different color of the rainbow) that are formed by and split up into various geometric patterns. Glass’s music underscores the animation in a style that closely resembles the “Dance” numbers and the North Star vignettes written during the same time period as his Einstein on the Beach opera.”
Hilma af Klint (1862 – 1944)
“Hilma af Klint was a Swedish artist and mystic whose paintings were amongst the first abstract art. She belonged to a group called ‘The Five’ and the paintings or diagrams were a visual representation of complex philosophical ideas.”
“At the Academy of Fine Arts she met Anna Cassel, the first of the four women with whom she later worked in “The Five” (de Fem), a group of artists who shared her ideas. The group of female artists The Five was engaged in the paranormal and regularly organized spiritistic séances. They recorded in a book a completely new system of mystical thoughts in the form of messages from higher spirits, called The High Masters (“Höga Mästare”). One, Gregor, spoke thus: “all the knowledge that is not of the senses, not of the intellect, not of the heart but is the property that exclusively belongs to the deepest aspect of your being…the knowledge of your spirit”.”
Booklet with drawings by Hilma af Klint.
“The pictures were painted directly through me, without any preliminary drawings, and with great force. I had no idea what the paintings were supposed to depict; nevertheless I worked swiftly and surely, without changing a single brush stroke.”
Svanen (The Swan), nr 17, Group 9, Series SUW, October 1914 – March 1915. This abstract work was never exhibited during af Klint’s lifetime.
Marcel Duchamp 1912
“Duchamp submitted the work to appear with the Cubists at the 28th exhibition of the Société des Artistes Indépendants, Paris, 25 March through 16 May 1912. It appeared under the number 1001 of the catalogue, entitled simply Nu descendant l’escalier, not Nu descendant un escalier n° 2. This catalogue revealed the title of the painting to the general public for the first time, even though the painting itself would be absent from the exhibition. It has been noted disquisitively that the number 1001 of Duchamp’s entry at the 1912 Indépendants catalogue also happens to represent in the form 10.01 the integer 2 in the Golden ratio base, related to the golden section, something of much interest to the Duchamps and others of the Puteaux Group. This, of course, was by chance—and it is not known whether Duchamp was familiar enough with the mathematics of the golden ratio to have made such a connection—as it was by chance too the relation to Arabic Manuscript of One Thousand and One Nights dating back to the 14th century.”
“The painting combines elements of both the Cubist and Futurist movements. In the composition, Duchamp depicts motion by successive superimposed images, similar to stroboscopic motion photography. Duchamp also recognized the influence of the stop-motion photography of Étienne-Jules Marey, particularly Muybridge’s Woman Walking Downstairs from his 1887 picture series, published as The Human Figure in Motion.”
Maya Frame Loop expression
Note to self: the expression “(frame)%250” will loop a 250 frame sequence in Maya. But they don’t put it in the help files.
Y’all got that?
Paul Greer 