Perspectives on the Serigraph 

Barber, Scott, untitled, seriagraph

in Davidow collection at UT Dallas

Science & Technology

We all know that there is more to light than it meets our eye.

Have you ever wondered that what if our eyes could have seen more than just the visible range of spectrum. That would be one hell of a superpower. But don't you worry.. Science and Technology has made it possible now to see even that which is invisible to the naked eye.

original picture

infrared image

Gamma rays

Universe 

Universe in Gama rays

Now looking at the puddles of color in the image ask your self -'is it the gamma rays image of some galaxy ?'

BuzzFeed video on 'Life through thermal vision'

Infrared vision

Ultraviolet Vision

Engineering

We all will agree that Mother Nature is an amazing engineer in herself. Looking at the our our piece when I was trying to think of ' what does it represent ' , ' does it represent any naturally occurring structure ?' . what it could be ? Blue all around with gradually intensifying red in the center . Then it hit me . I started researching about oceanography and tectonic plates and I was amazes to find this 

Tamu Massif

Tamu Massif is world’s largest volcano in Solar System

Tamu Massif, an extinct submarine shield volcano formed about 145 million years ago during the Late Jurassic period, is located 2 km below sea level between Japan and Hawaii in the Pacific Ocean.

Previously, the volcano was considered to be smaller overall by 20 per cent than Olympus Mons on Mars, long hailed as the largest volcano discovered in our solar system. Tamu Massif reaches a height of 4km while Olympus Mons is 22km.

Arts   

While looking through the life history of artist and especially the period when he made this piece , it was revealed that he was fighting cancer. It wont be a hard to guess that cancer might have affected his work but I wonder if it had been source of motivation , as well.

Here is the picture of cancerous cell. Its uncanny similarity is remarkable.

Molecular basis for melanoma cell motility: actin-rich podosomes (yellow), along with cell nuclei (blue), actin (red), and an actin regulator (green)

Maths

Looking at the picture and thinking about maths the first thing that comes to our mind is Polygon, in fact chains of concentric Polygons and methods to represent contours in topography.

look .. how remarkably similar our piece of art is with the given contour map of place . 

Social Media Sharing

Here is the code that can be used to create a share / like button for a website to share the content over well know Social networking site like Facebook , twitter etc. 

OK , lets start then .

I attached two html pages: 

social_media.html : to demonstrate the code for sharing on Facebook, twitter, etc

custom_media.html : to create active tweets. For example if I am supposed to tweet about say sculptor like "Love Jack " at UT Dallas then all you need to do is to click on the button and 

type your tweet . By default it is #lovejack but you can definitely change it .

And pics(of how screen will look like) in this folder.

   

Social Media.html   

code on Git-hub

For this html, social media buttons are displayed using 'Sharethis' website embedded code

There different ways to customize the buttons (horizontal or vertical) in the website. This is the simplest way and easy to display social media buttons.

Custom Media.html

code on Git-hub

This html file uses code given by each social networking website separately like 

Facebook Like button plugin

Pinterest Widget-builder 

Google + link

Twitter #hashtag.

see html file to how to use it. This requires more code work and time spent.

Helpful link: Adding-social-media-buttons-to-your-website

Note:

This website need to run on webserver. I used wamp server on my computer (since I have a windows). 

Love Jack

1. Etymology of the word “Jack” throughout history and culture

Name Jack is believed to of British origin . Used to denote any ordinary man of (mostly youth ) during mid century. Soon the the name catch on and People with formal name like John , Jacob , Jackson, etc. were also started to be called as Jack as their pet name.

16th century Jack
symbol of ordinary man in England

Popularity of Jack has reached to such an extent that from 1995 to till now Jack is the most common name of all in England other English speaking countries . This has to do a lot with this notion that it means someone who is "Healthy, Strong, Full of Vital Energy, really jubilant ". 

Fictional character - Jack Dawson
Titanic (1997)

The word also began to be associated with objects which can help in saving human labor as though one had a helper : jackhammer , jackknife , jack (for lifting car ).

For centuries notion of Jack meant someone ordinary , a good fella with helping nature , some who gets or helps the work get done, arose a general sense of laborer in the early 18 century giving birth to word like  steeplejack, lumberjack , etc.

Jack often was used to represent minimum standards , for example jack in playing cards represents lowest place on or the court .

After some time the sense of smallness began to be associated with the word. Hence when people were trying to come up with an apt name for the game which included :

tossing and catching small round pebbles or Star-shaped of metal or plastic. Game of small pieces => Game of jacks , meant sense.

Other places where you might have heard The word Jack . like :

2. Personal Perspective on a game remarkable similar to the Game of Jacks. 

In Personal Perspective, would love to share the story of this game ,which my grandmother used to play, and is remarkably similar to the game of Jacks.
Game called Goti used to be played in played in India. Very prevalent during time of 1945-1980 in rural parts of Bihar, India. Now to put things in perspective : This is the map pf India and the state marked in red is my home state Bihar .

And by the way Bihar is the place where Buddha found enlightenment.

So coming back to the story . So 1945-1980 was a very harsh period . India had just jot its Independence from the the British rule in 1947. Economic state of the country was in ruins and especially state of bihar was most poorest of them all . People did not had access to basic amenities like water , electricity , houses etc. Kids during those times did not even had a toys to play with simply because their parents cant afford it. Especially for girls who were not allowed to go outside into the field and play like the boys . It was really really a harsh time but as my grand mother say " You cant tell times are bad if you have never seen a good one". So as a  result kids improvised and started playing this game called Goti , which required nothing but few pebbles . 

The game was fairly simple . There are many versions of it depending on the places and level you are playing . I have explained the basic level below played among 4 people.

This game is played with Four people and 5 pebbles.

Each player takes their turn one by one . These are the things that you are required to do :

1. Round one : Take one pebble in your hand , throw it in the air , we call it "guthwa" and mean while it is in the air try to grab any one of the four remaining pebbles on the table and then catch the guthwa. then keep it doing untill you have collected all the pebbles. If your continuity breaks then you note down the points and bring back all the pebbles and give chance to the person sitting next to you.  

here is the video of me (trying to play the game).

3. Sonification of Jack

Sonification is the process of taking a dataset and mapping it with a corresponding scale of sound . Inorder to sonify Love Jack Sculptor I have used a process called image sonification . Steps are as Follows :

Step 1. Choose a image 

Step 2. Extract component of RGB from the pixel clicked on screen . ( every pixel has a specific color with particular RGB)

Step 3. Map the values of each pixel to numerical value into a array.

Step 4. Map the values Stored in the array to that of a Sound.

Step 5. Play the sound.

Any music/ song in general have three components:
1. Bass
2. Snare
3. HighHat

Just like three components of  of color in any image
Hence, I mapped the sounds to color component as follows

1. Bass      -> Red

2. Snare    -> Green

3. HighHat -> Blue

Code : 
link contains html and JavaScript file.

Building a Galaxy

 

Our Model 

 

 

Description : 

In the far left at the tip is Sun (due to its immense gravity all other minor heavenly bodies get drawn towards it ). Model represents Mercury and Earth, Moon , Jupiter and to to show the far off region like Kuiper belt Pluto (our favorite Dwarf planet) is shown.

Here is the labeled photo of that .

How it was made ?

 Lets start from the beginning .

Choosing the design.

After going through a lot of designs we decided to go with the Tornado art. The overall shape give a feel of the intricate movement of the large heavenly bodies which we perceive as stationary objects .

The shape and our design , incorporated a flat back so that the piece can be mounted flush against a wall.

 The design were made on 3D-Maya then imported to Pepakura.

 3D Model sliced into pieces using Pepakura and then laid out.

Once the model has been laid out in Pepakura, the file needs to be exported in two separate

formats to translate to illustrator.  Once is for the object layer and the other is for the text.

layer.  This is the exported file for the object layer.

 Here are some pics to show work in progress.

 After Stitching(with .125 and .25 inch white tape ) up everything together .

Then after that a little bit of wiring  

We are done !