Category: Art

Those that were the farthest out have gone the other way

SquaresDetail
The image above is a small detail from a much larger wallpaper image I created. I wasn’t able to find any nice wallpaper graphics big enough to span my three obscenely large computer monitors, so I created one of my own. I created it with the computer language PHP and carefully tweaked the random variables until I got an effect I liked. I spend the bulk of my days on arbitrage of one sort or another, which means that I spend a lot of time looking for patterns in the noise, or more precisely I spend my time trying to get a computer to find patterns in the noise. To really understand randomness, you have to spend a lot of time faking it. The same could be said about art, perhaps, which got me thinking about the intersection of art and computing…
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Headlights in the deep

Martin_Wittfooth-Sandcastles_in_the_Tide. Click for larger version.
Prolific artist Martin Wittfooth uses animals and human artifacts to create moody paintings which inspire a feeling of emptiness and desolation, worlds of decay where cranky, suspicious, or indifferent chimeras roam though 20th century ruins. Shown above: “Sandcastles in the Tide”.

Ship me back home from a secret location

Markku_Lahdesmaki-Robot_Series. Click for a larger version.
In general I prefer not to bother readers of this blog with personal entries: the artwork I post is far more interesting than anything happening in my life, and twitter is a much better place to find out what people had for lunch. That said, I’ve been absent from the blog so often that an explanation (or at least some BS excuse) seems in order. Also, I’ve gotten some emails wondering if my obsession for dangerous fish finally took me down.

That is, however, not the case. I’m fine-ish. I’ve just been slaving away in my not-so-dank arbitrage cave, obsessing about numbers and algorithms until my head cries our for sweet liquid relief, coffee or beer or what can you bring me? I tend towards the lazy, simple life, so I build these extrodinarily complicated tools to save me from thinking and effort. Problem is, creating those tools isn’t so simple. The savings from my labor saving devices are supposed to pan out in the long run, but everyone knows what happens in the long run.

At any rate I feel ready to emerge from my coding-cave and step back in the world of color and image. Hopefully my devices are now are ready to be left to their own devices, we shall see.

Shown above: a photo from the Robot Series by photographer Markku Lahdesmaki.