Links: Cool Stuff

[Xaos]

Yes, here is some cool stuff that really doesnt fit anywhere else...and most of it is free 
-----------------


Desktop Earth
http://codefromthe70s.org/desktopearth_dl.asp

Desktop Earth is a wallpaper generator for Windows. It runs whenever you're logged on and updates your wallpaper with an accurate representation of the Earth as it would be seen from space at that precise moment.

Images are created from high-resolution textures (2560x1280) so it's perfect for that QSXGA display - but they work on anything, even on SVGA.

There is an image for every month to accurately depict snow and foliage changes, and the night view is simply stunning.

The imagery is based on NASA's Blue Marble Next and Earth's City Lights.

Also has an auto updating cloud overlay feature that is semi-realtime. Very interesting.
I just installed this, and its very cool. Will be very interesting during the next hurricane season.
Windows only at this time.

-----------------

Electric Sheep
http://www.electricsheep.org

Electric Sheep is a free, open source screen saver run by thousands of people all over the world. It can be installed on any ordinary PC or Mac. When these computers "sleep", the screen saver comes on and the computers communicate with each other by the internet to share the work of creating morphing abstract animations known as "sheep". The result is a collective "android dream", an homage to Philip K. Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.

Anyone watching one of these computers may vote for their favorite animations using the keyboard. The more popular sheep live longer and reproduce according to a genetic algorithm with mutation and cross-over. Hence the flock evolves to please its global audience.

-----------------

Apophysis
http://www.apophysis.org/

Apophysis is a freeware fractal flame creator and editor. It is the base program from which the fractal animations
in Electric Sheep are created. Check the link for examples and tutorials. Windows only.
-----------------


More as I find it.

[Xaos]

Whats Special About This Number?
http://www.archimedes-lab.org/numbers/Num1_69.html


Interesting site featuring mathematical, scientific, or quirky details about ever number from 1 - 500. Lots of cool, interesting,
and perhaps useful stuff here.

[Xaos]

http://www.wefeelfine.org/

We Feel Fine is an exploration of human emotion on a global scale.

Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world's newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases "I feel" and "I am feeling". When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the "feeling" expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved.

The result is a database of several million human feelings, increasing by 15,000 - 20,000 new feelings per day. Using a series of playful interfaces, the feelings can be searched and sorted across a number of demographic slices, offering responses to specific questions like: do Europeans feel sad more often than Americans? Do women feel fat more often than men? Does rainy weather affect how we feel? What are the most representative feelings of female New Yorkers in their 20s? What do people feel right now in Baghdad? What were people feeling on Valentine's Day? Which are the happiest cities in the world? The saddest? And so on.

The interface to this data is a self-organizing particle system, where each particle represents a single feeling posted by a single individual. The particles' properties ? color, size, shape, opacity ? indicate the nature of the feeling inside, and any particle can be clicked to reveal the full sentence or photograph it contains. The particles careen wildly around the screen until asked to self-organize along any number of axes, expressing various pictures of human emotion. We Feel Fine paints these pictures in six formal movements titled: Madness, Murmurs, Montage, Mobs, Metrics, and Mounds.

At its core, We Feel Fine is an artwork authored by everyone. It will grow and change as we grow and change, reflecting what's on our blogs, what's in our hearts, what's in our minds. We hope it makes the world seem a little smaller, and we hope it helps people see beauty in the everyday ups and downs of life.

Click the "Open We Feel Fine" bar to launch it, and you can change the variables in the top bar of the new window The interface is very customizeable to show a large range of feelings in relation to age, gender, location, weather, etc. Check the lower left menu to change various aspects and what it displays. I thought the 'murmur' feature was interesting because you can get the whole sentence or use of the emotions you selected from the people that wrote them. Mounds is a good breakdown of the use of the words too. Pretty interesting stuff.

[Kephra]

Thats a very clever site.  Its good to see such creativity.

[Xaos]

Yeah I thought so too. Just as the global conscoiusness projects are coming to been seen as a projection of shifts of humanities collective mind in the future and present, I think this goes along as a great tool to see the ways in which people are reflecting their feelings and current emotional states at specific times, perhaps in coorespondence to the consciousness projects and other world/earth changing events. 

[Xaos]

5D Rubiks Cube

Yea, good luck!!

http://www.gravitation3d.com/magiccube5d/

If its too hard you can always try the 4D one linked at the bottom of the page 

[Xaos]

Before the transpsychedelic art of Alex Grey was Paul Laffoley. Very interesting and hyperdimensional stuff to keep you thinking for hours.

www.laffoley.com/
www.kentgallery.com
www.myspace.com/paullaffoley

Sorry for any bad coding, I just copied the html from somewhere else.

~X

"Paul Laffoley,  a painter and architect,  is one of the most encyclopedic of visionary geniuses."~Alex Grey,  Visionary Artist

The FUTURE ART of Visionary Philosopher/Designer Laffoley has been here for Decades! His paintings convey details of concepts including physically alive arcietecture,  group mind interfaces,  2012 Time-machines,  structured singularities,  and more.



 

Paul Laffoley painting - oil & acrylic with lettering on panel Laffoley's art describes the emergence of the Bauharoque  .....which is the last period in the Modern Cycle,  beginning at the turn of the second millenium A.D. and lasting to the year 2099. This time period will see the end of 'science fiction' as all possibilities become reality.
Religions,  morality,  mysticism and technology converge and after this sequence (which is happenng now) - all technology becomes physically alive as evolution becomes artificial & self-directed. Life and death become united and sex,  race,  species,  matter,  mind,  space and time become interchangeable.


 

By the late 1980s,  Laffoley began to move from the spiritual and the intellectual,  and evolved to the view of his work as an interactive,  physically engaging Psychotronic device,  perhaps similar to architectural monuments such as Stonehenge or the Cathedral of Notre Dame ~Doug Walla of Kent gallery.
New art now on the profile! Thanks and love,
miqel & valis (Laffoley profile admin)
Ready for more? Check the Laffoley Online Archive Project




Quotes from laffoley>

LEVOGYRE:


he describes The Levogyre (1976) as<font color="navy"> nested shells connected by gimbels [in] an attempt to model a photon creating light, and in turn an atom of consciousness. The structure of the Levogyre derives from structure of the Universe proposed by Eudoxus (the astronomer pupil of Plato). Eudoxus stated that the Universe is a series of nested crystalline spheres which contained the stars as fixed, the planets which moved, down to the central non-rotating Earth. Each sphere is connected to the next by gimbel-like axes which are randomly distributed. </font>

Its hard to imagine any of the current art reviewers beginning to approach such discourse. To say that his work looks like no one elses is a minor compliment, for no other visual artist writes about his work as Laffoley does.

reference: Essay: "Three Visual Litterateurs (1992)"
by R. Kostelanetz,&nbsp; www.RichardKostelanetz.com




On NATURE and TECHNOLOGY
from WIRED Magazine, 2000:

<font color="navy">"You can't invent anything that hasn't occurred in nature," </font>says Paul Laffoley, a painter and trained architect.<font color="navy"> "In architecture, you're literally uncovering nature's creativity and punching it up a little." </font>A typically punched-up vision is Laffoley'sDas Urpflanze Haus (the primordial plant house), which offers genetically engineered seeds as a solution to the housing shortage. Laffoley's portfolio, including a human-powered vehicle and a time machine, echoes the weird science of Nikola Tesla and Buckminster Fuller: Intricate illustrations and collages graft ancient occultism, eccentric engineering, particle phy-sics, and a dose of ufology onto obsessively detailed building plans for a surreal alternative future."

- David Pescovitz

</p><p>

Reviews &amp; discussion of paul's work

7-Mile Wide Orbital TIME MACHINE:

"If youve ever wondered how you might build a working time machine - and dont we all - look no further than Disinformation: The Interviews where noted artist and futurist Paul Laffoley explains how a science fiction device hes invented measuring 7 square miles and hoisted into geo-synchronous orbit above the earths surface can fulfill the definition of time travel as it was presented in HG Wells novel, The Time Machine. Laffoley also unveils his blueprints for a vegetable house grown from a single seed."
&nbsp;
REVIEW OF&nbsp; "Disinformation: The Interviews"
The Konformist. February 2003



ACADEMIC REVIEW Of LAFFOLEYS WORK

University of Texas Presentation:
Art, Science, Technology and Beyond in the Later 20th Century
Session 10D: Art, Technology, Linda Henderson (University of Texas). Society for Literature &amp; Science
<font color="navy">Paul Laffoley:</font>
The Artist as Occult/Scientific Visionary. For four decades, artist Paul Laffoley has maintained an independent course, operating outside the art world establishment. His paintings are unique image/text combinations rooted in 1960s hard-edge abstraction and other types of diagrammatic images (e.g., mandalas, scientific wall charts).

Laffoley describes these works as portals to higher levels of knowledge or consciousness. Each painting includes at the bottom edge a list of names headed Homage to and followed by such figures as Abbott, Bergson, Bragdon, Dunne, Fuller, Gurdjieff, Hinton, Leadbeater, Ouspensky, Plotinus, Steiner, Swedenborg, Tesla, Wells, or Zöllneras well Paul Davies, Dirac, Edison, Haeckel, Hawking, Mandelbrot. As these names suggest, Laffoleys worldview combines an extensive knowledge of mystical/occult philosophies with an interest in science and mathematics in a manner akin to many early 20th-century artists.

&nbsp;This paper will explore Laffoleys art and theory, focusing specifically on his 1992 painting Dimensionality: The Manifestation of Fate.&nbsp; reference: http://www.law.duke.edu/sls/2004/sls2004program.html

</p><p>

Review on DIAGRAMATIC ART from blog DataIsNature.com
"Paul Laffoley makes visionary schematic diagrams of metaphysical knowledge systems with incredible complexity.

Interested in diagrammatic structures, Paul Laffoley has studied architecture at Harvard and M.I.T.

Since the 60s Laffoley has been painting in his downtown Boston studio, exhibiting his work in the Boston area, and writing and speaking on three topics including Dimensionality with relationship to Duchamp, Utopic Space, and research and mapping of the possibility of an idea he developed concerning physically alive architecture by means of grafted vegetation.'

It seems machines for time travel and perpetual motion are metaphysical motifs recurring throughout Paul Laffoleys work and these ideas feature in some of my favourite works such as Geochronmechane - The Time Machine from the Earth. At a distance his work has a computational feel to it, relying on faux three-dimensionality and complex structural schematics that resemble work from a 3D program.

What really puts these visionary works in a class of their own however, is the hermetic interlinking of complex metaphysical ideas and their respective correspondences. Amazing work."

reference: from www.dataisnature.com

</p><p>

POST-MODERNISM- from the web
Quoted from a Laffoley Painting about WTC:
<font color="navy">"According to the architectural critic Charles A. Jencks, the heroic first phase of modernism died in St. Louis Missouri on July 15, 1972 at 5:32 P.M. central daylight time when Minoru Yamasaki's Pruitt-Igoe public housing project was demolished for its negative social impact. In a final paroxysm of irony postmodernism ended with the destruciton of an other building by Minoru Yamasaki - The World Trade Center in New York City, 09/11/2001 at 8:45 - 9:03 am edst."

"The Bauharoque is the third phase of modernism, sometimes called post-post-modernism, trans-modernism, or neo-modernism - the word means the utopian impulse of the bauhaus is united with the theatricality of the baroque. This period in history transcends science-fiction... and all technology will be actual living structures." </font>
- Paul Laffoley (unreferenced quote collected from web)



EFFECTS OF LAFFOELY'S&nbsp; ART

- from the blogosphere
"The best art often captures the future before it even happens. Laffoley's monolithic paintings don't just grab your attention, they throttle it, tie it to a chair, pry it's eyes open and force it to examine every little detail. His art is wilderness your sanity can get lost in... After being exposed to his work, you find yourself poring through ancient esoteric books on alchemy, qabalah, gnosticism, and other lost arts, in the vain hope that it will help you decipher even a tiny portion of one of Laffoley's epic paintings."

reference: sypha23. posted by Dennis Cooper
&nbsp;www.blogspot.denniscooper.com

[Xaos]

Here is an interesting little diagram of our biochemical processes and how things are used, converted, exchanged and so forth.
You can click within the grid coordinates to enlarge it, and at the bottom is a like to another chart for metabolic processes. Dont
you wish you would have paid more attention in your biology classes now?    Well dont feel bad, I cant interpret a good bit of
it either. I just thought some people would like it, I think its a pretty neat schematic showing the complexities of our bodily processes
and such.

http://www.expasy.org/cgi-bin/show_thumbnails.pl?2

[Xaos]

Heres another modern psychedelic/new age artist that I think some of you would like.

http://spectraleyes.com/art.html

Luke Brown is an intrepid explorer, part of a new generation of visionaries recontructing the templates of culture as we know it. His art speaks of the spiritual mysteries in the human imagination.

Mystical experiences, dreams, medicine journeys, and channelled lucid dialogues with the source of creativity itself, seem to guide and be guided by the colourful symmetries and living surfaces of his art. Much of his work emerges from a graceful synthesis of digital and painting mediums. Developing his work through mix and remix technologies, Luke is constantly redefining his style as a spiritual medium for growth. He is intent on mapping his hyperspatial experiences with utmost accuracy, with whichever medium seems best suited, as a form of multidimensional cartography.

His art has been shown internationally with such visionary heavyweights such as Alex Grey, HR Giger, Robert Venosa and Ernst Fuchs. He is currently a resident of the lush Elfinstone rainforest in BC Canada, one of an infinite number of parallel universes in which he resides within simultaneously.

A small sample:

[Quemoni]

Cell phone tower locator
http://www.cellreception.com/towers/

[Xaos]

You gotta see this:

http://www.zo.utexas.edu/faculty/antisense/DownloadfilesToL.html

This file can be printed as a wall poster. Printing at least 54" wide is recommended.
Blueprint shops and other places with large format printers can print this file for you.
You are welcome to use it for non-commercial educational purposes.
Please cite the source as David M. Hillis, Derrick Zwickl, and Robin Gutell, University of Texas.
About this Tree: This tree is from an analysis of small subunit rRNA sequences sampled
from about 3,000 species from throughout the Tree of Life. The species were chosen based
on their availability, but we attempted to include most of the major groups, sampled
very roughly in proportion to the number of known species in each group (although many
groups remain over- or under-represented). The number of species
represented is approximately the square-root of the number of species thought to exist on Earth
(i.e., three thousand out of an estimated nine million species), or about 0.18% of the 1.7 million
species that have been formally described and named. This tree has been used
in many museum displays and other educational exhibits, and its use for educational purposes
is welcomed. Here is a photo of the tree as it was used in an exhibit on "Massive Change:
The Future of Global Design" (which first opened in the Vancouver Art Gallery, and has since appeared
in Toronto and Chicago, and is scheduled to be displayed in various venues around the world):

Go ahead and open the .pdf, zoom in about 300% to the edge of the circle and check it out. It would be
very cool to have a full size print of this. Also I thought the geometric type pattern was very interesting.

[Xaos]

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a8/LT-SEM_snow_crystal_magnification_series-3.jpg

If you're on dialup, might take you a while to load, its about 1.5M.
Very beautiful and interesting to see the crystal ice structure though

[Xaos]

A while back I posted about visionary artist Paul Laffoley at the beginning of this thread

Well this coming Monday night at 11PM-2AM CST, 12 midnite-3AM EST, Paul will be giving his first ever live radio interview
on radiOrbit. I think it will be a very awesome show and everyone should check it out if they can. I hate to say it
but Laffoley is gettin' up there in the years and may not be around too much longer, so this will be an awesome
opportunity to check him out if you've never heard him speak before, or just havent heard of him at all.

Links:
http://www.radiorbit.com

Live stream through:
http://www.kopn.org ("listen live" button at the top menu bar)

If you do miss it the show will be available for free download a day or two after the shows air date through the
radiOrbit website I posted above...archives are on the right hand side and there are lots of other good people
Mike has interviewed as well including John Major Jenkins, Jay Weidner, Kent Steadman (Cyberspace Orbit),
Geoff Stray (Diagnosis2012), Denis McKenna, and tons more, all free of course 

[edit]
Also, there is live chat during the broadcast, link is on radiOrbit site in lefthand menu bar. Here you can talk to
others listening and Mike is in chat too so you have chances to ask questions for him to ask his guests, very cool.