Thoughts April 9 1992 -

Thoughts                                                                                                         April 9, 1992 

4 rows back on a comfortable Greyhound bus watching the road slip away in a reflective way she sits in the driver's rear view mirror lost in thought. Chez 106 fades in and out on the air waves as I seem to fade in and out. Flicked a switch and everything seems perfectly loud and clear.   I need to find that switch in my life!  What are you watching?   I see the road, 4 cars in front, jockeying for position.  In a hurry?  Perhaps just competing. Fighting for a place in life.  Not fast enough? Move over and let me by.  I’ll leave you in the dirt!  Depressing.

“In Defence of Logical Thought”. The two cultures. Artist and Scientist. I am and always will be a logical thinker.  Yet I have been exploring my artistic side.  Exploring myself through art.  Art is just an expression of myself.

Life around me now. A man reading an exercise magazine (technical & intellectual). No glossy pictures of Golden Pecs, Breasts or Butts. Afraid of his heart. Afraid of dying? Looking for Love. Preppy green cords + pinstripe white + blue shirt, mens cologne, manicured hands. What I am afraid of becoming. A man.  “Une Morte de Propagande”, a goatee, a ponytail in a purple hair bungee, glasses, white shirt + blue jeans, black socks and black doc like leather shoes practices foot massage on an older motherlike woman across the aisle.

Getting down to the bus was stressful. Packing, unpacking, repacking. Should I take this? Leave that? I want to travel light yet be prepared for every contingency.  Just passed Herbs candy striped Restaurant and Service Station on the 417.  Gotta go in there some day to eat and check out the place.  Stop by the roadside and see what life has to offer.  Also thought about pride. Very few people seem to take pride in their work.  There is no national sense of pride.  If we taught our children pride.  Our children become us so we should make ourselves as we can… 

Listening to French Radio.  Seems to have a different rhythm.  The signal gets stronger as we get closer to Montreal. Listening to a Walkman really takes me to another world. Why must our existence in this world be the only one? Let your imagination free.  The real world looks flat after VR.  Is the symptoms of a drug addiction.  Smart Drugs, Smart Food, Smart Exercise, Smart Sex, Smart, Smart, Smart…  Just leaving you smarting. Orchestral music - somehow great + prideful. But perhaps Pride is harmful.  This writing is losing it. Uninspired. Disconnected, no purpose. Nothing to express.  Just a path in the sand traced by the slow swings of the pendulum of time. Somehow seeming permanent yet blown away by time as if in a violent storm.  Where have 29 years gone? It seems as if I have gone nowhere and that there are many places left to go.  I have not celebrated my life. I have held no ritual for myself. I have not become a man - (responsible).  The Little Prince.  My mind travels through many worlds. It is an active mind. Unfocussed mind. Gotta find that occupation or calling that will focus my mind + focus my passion.  The power of the little prince is Flying. <- Freedom. Analysis of our myths, fairy tales, dreams.

What do I dream about? Do I let myself dream? Dream and I shall come to pass. Become aware of your surroundings physically and emotionally.

Ciao for Now - Coming into Montreal.

Regular Tetrahedrons

My latest thing has been regular tetrahedrons. My goal is to eventually make these from stainless steel.

I spent some time creating a 3D model of a regular tetrahedron in Fusion 360. Then I 3D printed a few for sanity check. Next up was to make some of these from 3mm Baltic Birch. Each tetrahedron requires laser cutting 4 equilateral triangles from birch plywood. Then a sanding jig is used to sand each of the 3 edges of each triangle to the correct beveled angle so that each side can be joined the other sides with no gap.

Finally a glue up jig is used to hold the sides easily for assembly. The basic assembly step (laser cutting, bevelling, glue up) of one tetrahedron takes about about 5 minutes per Tetrahedron

Preparing each tetrahedron to use as an art surface requires additional surface prep time. Any cracks are filled with wood filler, then each side is sanded and all the four surfaces are Gessoed in preparation for painting.

Each Tetrahedron provides four perfect surfaces for creating miniature art pieces. Groupings of tetrahedrons builds larger pieces. The possibilities for repeating patterns are endless in both 2D and 3D spaces. I am looking forward to exploring the possibilities of this space.

Threaded Portrait

I came across the work of Petros Vrellis via the 2016 hackaday.com post "Computer-Designed Portraits, Knit by Hand" I was instantly drawn to the hand sketched look of these exquisite pieces.  I knew that I had to try his technique for myself.

An excellent writeup of Petros Vrellis process is found on his site at A New Way To Knit.

Petros did not go into detail on his algorithm for generating the threading algorithm.   Vancouver Hack Space member Dan Royer helped out with providing his own implementation of this weaving algorithm.   

You can find Dan's version of the  Portrait Thread Weaving Code on Github

You can also watch Dan's algorithm in action on his Youtube video.

Dan runs a company and website called https://www.marginallyclever.com which is a great resource for DIY robots and robot generated art.

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I have a new found respect for Petros Vrellis having experienced the amount of work that goes into producing one of these pieces.  The preparation time for the bicycle rim with drilling two hundred holes and attaching paperclip hooks plus the time it takes to thread a wheel is not insignificant.  There is also the time spent fine tuning your images and learning what will work and what will not.  I liken this process to exposing and printing an image in a darkroom.  You're not quite sure what you will get until it is printed.  This piece took me well over 40 hours to figure out and complete.