Rpg. Resources. Ascii. Minimalism. アーノルド・ベックリン Arnold Boecklin. Bone China Autopsies by Beccy Ridsel. Fine china should be handled with care, as demonstrated by artist/sculptor Beccy Ridsel earlier this year. “This work was an installation, set up as a lab experiment in progress, complete with scalpels, lab coats, needles and a microscope. Piles of dicarded, cut-up craft objects lay about the desk, some with their innards seeping out, others rearranged, Frankenstein-style.” The purpose of Ridsel’s experiment was to find the point at which craft transforms into art, a problematic division she discusses in a post on Yatzer. She notes at the end of the article, “I am currently working on domestic variations of these pieces; the irony of [this] isn’t lost on me.”
[via Asha Beta] Escherization. Over his life, the Dutch graphic artist M.C. Escher created over a hundred ingenious tesselations in the plane. Some were simple and geometric, used as prototypes for more complex endeavors. But in most the tiles were recognizable animal forms such as birds, fish and reptiles. The definitive reference on Escher's divisions of the plane is Doris Schattschneider's Visions of Symmetry, now in a second edition. A good place to view some of Escher's work online is the World of Escher. Be sure also to check out these examples from Escher's notebook: E25, E70, and E72.
Escher was able to discover such tilings through a combination of natural ability and sheer determination. Given a shape S, find a new shape T such that: T is as close as possible to S; and Copies of T fit together to form a tiling of the plane. We have developed an algorithm that can produce reasonable solutions to the Escherization problem. A parameterized space of tilings. Here are some images produced using Escherization. Alex Grey. The Art Of Braid: Creating A Visual Identity For An Unusual Game. [In this fascinating deconstruction, artist David Hellman explains his collaboration with Jonathan Blow to create the evocative, painterly art for acclaimed downloadable game Braid, which debuts tomorrow on Xbox Live Arcade.]
Braid had already appeared at two GDCs before I ever got involved. Jonathan Blow, its creator, showed Braid's time manipulation puzzle-platformer gameplay at a couple Experimental Gameplay Workshops, and an Independent Games Festival, where it won an award for game design. Minus some polish, it was nearly a finished game: playable, coherent and individualistic.
Visually, though, it was primitive. The fragments of fictional prose introducing each level indicated Braid's ambition. It sounds grandiose in summary, but it's not. Hired as visual artist in the summer of 2006, my challenge was not only to clearly present Braid's mechanics and behaviors, but to help tell a story that was anything but literal: part anecdote, part artifice, part philosophy. Ancient ruins (TM).