Gleaming the Cube

November 27, 2008 5:56 PM

Dave Bollinger is a computer artist that specializes in geometry. He creates both still images and short videos. Some videos are silent, like this unusual Pac-Man homage, and some have soundtracks. Some are in black and white and some are in color. His Flickr photostream categorizes still images by style. His current fascination seems to be with cubes and cubic lattices.
posted by Tube (5 comments total)

I question his Pac-Man strategy.
posted by jeffamaphone at 6:21 PM on November 27, 2008

One of the CS professors at UC Berkeley, Carlo Séquin, is a designer of abstract mathematical sculptures (his own work is here). Check out the slides for the guest lecture he gave my class yesterday - it's a great primer!
posted by archagon at 6:22 PM on November 27, 2008 [1 favorite]

Awesome. It reminds me when I used to toast 486 CPUs by programming (and attempting to render) recursive structures in POV-Ray (circa 1995).
posted by _dario at 7:40 PM on November 27, 2008

Some of these look awfully familiar.
posted by neckro23 at 10:38 PM on November 27, 2008

I guess what impresses me about Bollinger's cubes and lattices is the sheer power that a computer has to generate such complexity. Some time back I became interested in lattice structures, and built models the old fashioned way. I got a bunch of soft wax from Boeing Surplus, which had the consistency of bee's wax. Pinched off in little balls, these formed the vertices, and toothpicks the edges.

Unlike Bollinger, I was more interested in triangulated lattices, having encountered the work of Bucky Fuller. Here is a model I made of the so-called "Octet Truss".

Fuller called it the "Octet Truss" because the unit cell was composed of one octahedron and two tetrahedrons. But this can in fact be bisected, to create a unit cell consisting of one square pyramid, (Johnson Solid #1) and one tetrahedron.

I made a lattice model using the unit cell of another space-filling solid, the gyrobifastigium. The end result looks to me like something you might have seen on a playground back in the 1960's!

But from the looks of Bollinger's latest Flickr photo, it looks like he's got some sort of real-world project brewing too! Good luck!
posted by Tube at 11:03 PM on November 29, 2008