Letter 26 - 2024
The Mystery of Archimedes' Spiral, Work the Surface, AI and Materiality, and Reader Success Stories: The Wedding Video
Dear Story, Art, & Design Reader…
You’re getting this message because at some point you signed-up on my Twitter Medium LinkedIn or Insta. There are three sections: Story, Art, and Design.
Always free. Always interesting.
(To all the new readers… here’s a quick bio on me, just in case you can’t quite remember…)
Let’s get started… Here’s a visual preview of the post…
STORY
Archimedes and the Spiral of Time…
It’s the 12th Century AD. You, me, and everyone we know, are diligent, pious, and thrifty monks. Here at the Metochion of the Holy Sepulchre in Constantinople we scrape off ink from old parchment as best as we can and reuse it to write our prayers right on top.
Paper? We don’t have that. Papyrus? Don’t be ridiculous, that left us when Rome had its falling out with the Egyptians…
We use animal skins. Heated, stretched, de-fated with boiling water and scraped with a sharpened strigil, and then treated and dried. And then carefully folded. Why do we call the middle of a book the spine? Well—it’s literally the place where the hide would have stretched over the spine of the animal. Unfold a full sheet of parchment and you can still see the spine marks where the bones rubbed the skin from underneath.
Books are a sacrifice. And when we write on the skin, we do so in a way that almost tattoos it. The ink really gets in there, several layers deep. But, alas, it’s expensive. Very expensive. A whole book of the stuff, hand-copied, painted, and illustrated, and illuminated with gold costs as much as a modest house in Antwerp.
Today’s particular piece of parchment? Just some pagan nonsense about spirals and levers and other unholy thoughts. We see this kind of Ancient Greek huff-n-puff all the time.
…Except that this isn’t just any old ancient Greek huff-n-puff.
It is the only existing copy of a treatise by Archimedes, transcribed by a different monk 200 or so years ago. How amazing to hold it in our hands… 200 years after it was copied... 2200 years after it was originally written.
But instead of us shouting Eureka! and stashing the find, we scrape this text like all the others. Best to bury it… leave these thoughts to the dust of time.
But it wasn’t lost.
In 1906, Danish classical scholar Johan Ludvig Heiberg found the manuscript, read a few of the faint words that hadn’t been completely scraped away, and realized it was Archimedes. The manuscript went missing again, only to resurface in 1998 and purchased at auction for 2 million dollars—and then photographed, x-rayed, and translated.
Yet some pages proved impenetrable for a time.
They had been painted over by forgers trying to hide the true nature of the document. A team at SLAC (yes, the linear accelerator perched atop Sand Hill Road at Stanford… a building I pass by every day on the way to work…) figured out a way to get through the paint and learned the secrets of the final obscured pages.
What happened next?
It was completely open-sourced.
Yup. Made available for everyone. EVERYONE. Find it here.
https://www.archimedespalimpsest.net/
Spoilers: levers, spirals, calculus before calculus. So much to discuss about Archimedes. More to come.
If you’re looking for a translation… might I suggest Dr. Reviel Netz.
ART
Work the Surface
In the model-making studio at Dreamworks, there was an amazing Artist named Facundo Rabaudi. For a time, when everyone else was sculpting digitally, Cundo still made practical models. It helped us with imagining the scenes. It helped with figuring out the environments. It helped with the creative discussion. But mostly—it helped with something we never talked about—the magical vibe of being in a creative world. You walked into Cundo’s corner studio—messy, insane—and you felt like you had stepped into one of the worlds we were creating.
One of his techniques was quite interesting. When painting his sculptures, he didn’t try to “perfectly render” the surfaces with a series of optical illusions, like how a photo-realistic painter will paint in all the highlights and reflections and caustics. Instead, he created the effects more like how nature created them—he would pour paint down the sides so that the paint would pool and erode. He would scrub off paint to show wear and tear instead of faking it. His realism worked because it was actually real, not illusory. It was wild to watch him work.
I’m thinking about this because the best painting instruction I received in school wasn’t from the painting department, but from Master Printer, Brian Shure, who taught me how to work the surface of the plate. And this has made me want to work the surface of everything else.
As I strive to create work that draws the viewer in, and invites the viewer to co-create the experience, and tempts the viewer to transform her or his self... There is something important for me to pay attention to about the need to work the surface. It takes the work from being well-executed to being an almost-miracle.
How was this painted?
The answer, of course, it that it wasn’t painted. It was created. The material reality of the paint and surface were put to work. When you get it right… the result feels divine. And when it fails, it usually fails spectacularly, utterly, shamefully. Such a failure that you have to start over. But that’s OK. Starting over is part of the pleasure in art.
Here are two studies: not artworks, but illustrations of the point. The charcoal drawing shows the rough texture of the knife-scared cutting board that was sitting under my piece of drawing paper. The thick-impasto paint of the image on the right was not carefully layered, but created by the chaotic foment of pushing thick paint (until the paint pushed back). These are little experiments. But you can get the idea. Use the material reality of your surface and medium.
So what about digital media? What is the material reality of pixels? Generated or rendered? It exists: even if we can’t yet vibe it out… just as photography had a material reality and film has a material reality… digital experiences, for all of their attempts to embrace illusions of the surface, still indeed have a “materiality” present for us to unearth, acknowledge, and put to use to create art.
Film grain, CRT-Scan lines, Pixelation, Digital Blur, Matte Lines, Stuttering-frame rates, blend-modes, color-space, vectors shapes—these are digital “artifacts” we are mostly aware of—but what about the new worlds of the materiality of latent space? Of the n-dimensional space of the embedded & vectorized universe? How might traversing a fine-tuned AI model have its own material artifacts?
And what have we already uncovered?
Like the lone “banana” problem. Or last year’s 6-fingered hand (which, now strangely, is nearly completely solved).
These artifacts are now time-markers… that show us when an image was generated. Just as a haiku starts with a seasonal image of nature to laconically, yet poetically, set the time and place of the poem, so do fleeting, fading, artifacts (from film grain to distorted hands) mark the moments of their creation.
How might we find a way to pervert, perturb, embrace, expand, and expertly deploy the new materiality of the n-dimensional conceptual space of AI training for art?
Let’s work the surface together, and see if we can get somewhere deep.
DESIGN
Reader Success Stories: The Wedding Video
I got a DM from a stranger on Instagram—what a terrible beginning to a story, non? Surely this will end in disaster… I’m nervous even reading this and I know how it ends.
Normally I just ignore these. Such DMs are usually garbage, or worse. But this one was different. It was a link to a wedding video—a gloriously happy video—dancing, signing, laughing—it looked like a wonderful time. There was a man in a smart jacket and tie holding a microphone giving a confident, loving, enthusiastic toast.
It all looked wonderful.
The note that came with the video explained that he had read my post “How to Give a Toast” and that it had made all the difference. What a nice surprise! What a kind note! Co-workers stop me in the halls for this post. My neighbors stop me during my walks around the neighborhood to talk about it. Somehow this post connects with people. This was the first time, though, that I’d been sent a video. I loved it.
It is terrifically rewarding as a writer and designer to see someone else get some use out of what you put together. And then… within a few days… it happened again.
A friend of mine stopped me and told me that she had secretly been following the steps in my How to Finish What You Start. She is an accomplished designer and artist, but she had always wanted to become a published writer.
She diligently followed all the steps. I was nervous at first—would they work for her? She recruited accountability partners. She made a figjam project board. She gave herself deadlines lifelines, found her Creative Diligence, finished her text, sent it off, and got accepted for publication by her very top choice of literary magazines.
Amazing!
All done thousands of miles away from the publisher. All while having a demanding job and a new family. I was very proud of her work and that in its own small way, my framework might have helped.
These two stories—the wedding toast and the published story—made me very happy. They weren’t my successes—I didn’t give the toast or get published—but I did feel great. There is a special joy in seeing other people improve their lives because of something you wrote. We strive to design for transformation. It was wonderful to see it become a reality.
LINKS
Also, please let me know if you’ve ever used one of my frameworks to achieve a creative goal. I’d love to hear the story. If you’ve read sometime I’ve written and it has helped you, please let me know. I want to cheer you on!
Thanks for reading. If any of this turned over a card of curiosity in your mind, please let me know. You can reply to this email, or reach out to me on Twitter Medium LinkedIn or Insta.
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-Buckhouse