Regruntled.com

Here is a report on an experiment by the US government in the fifties. An artist produced a series of 9 drawings during the course of an LSD trip. The picture to the right is number 6, presumably when his brain chemistry was the most scrambled. Picture number 1 was a rather conventional portrait.

I wonder what would happen with an abstract artist, who starts out drawing stuff like this. Would drugs make him draw realistic landscapes?

I thought doing sudoku in color was weird, but this web site has sudoku with pictures of hamsters. I suppose it could be worse. The hamsters could be animated.

Here we have a fractal flame color-shifting a photo of a cat. There is an old saying:

To a three-year-old with a hammer, everything looks like it could use a bit of pounding.

To which I add:

To a computer nerd with a fractal flame generator and a color-shifting program, every digital photo looks like it needs some animation.

Is this an alien alphabet, and is there a secret decoder ring for it? Maybe it’s a syllabary, like Katakana. Maybe it’s a series of ideograms, like Chinese characters. How could we tell which? Or, just possibly, it’s something so alien that we don’t even have a category for it.



We are literate, so we are predisposed to believe that anything with this combination of regularity and disorder has to mean something. My fingers want to type “symbol”, but to call something a symbol is to assume that it has a particular kind of meaning. Maybe the glyphs are asemic writing, decorative but meaningless. How could we tell?



The glyphs were inspired by my non-periodic graph paper. I was designing a favicon, and with the limitation of 16 by 16 pixels, I wasn’t able to express the idea of a sudoku, so I went with Plan B.



I realized that my favicon was one of a number of variations. Well, of course, let’s generate them all and see what they look like. Let’s put them next to each other in different combinations and see what happens.

Is Thomas Jourdan the artist? He wrote Kandid, the open-source genetic art program that I used to generate this image. He’s never even seen the image. On the other hand, many people have contributed to the math behind fractals, genetic algorithms and evolutionary art. Do they deserve some credit?

Is Kandid, the program, the artist? Or is a program just a tool, much like Leonardo’s paintbrush was a tool?

Am I, the user, the artist? All I did was click a few buttons and see what happened.

Am I, the editor, the artist? I generated a few dozen images and picked out the one I liked best. That act of selection seems something like art, the same way I take a hundred pictures with my digital camera and delete 99 of them. However, if we call that art, we have to call what art critics do art as well.

Here is a math video so good that it’s fun to watch even if you aren’t interested in the math.

In art, there is the problem of perspective, the realistic representation of three-dimensional objects in two dimensions. In Medieval art, the Bayeaux Tapestry for example, objects are flat and depth is indicated by overlapping. During the Renaissance, artists worked out the rules of perspective by trial and error. In the seventeenth century, the mathematicians formalized the process, beat it to death, and called it projective geometry. And now we have come full circle: a video illustrating one of the basic principles of projective geometry, a video that is itself a work of art.

This is a variation of my non-periodic plaids. Maybe more practical, maybe not. You can download a 10-page pdf and print out as much as you want. Every page is different. Of course.

Download non-periodic graph paper

You may be asking, “what is non-periodic graph paper good for?” Good question! I just program this stuff, I don’t explain it. I program it because I can, not because I have a use in mind.


However: you can draw boxes for flow charts or organization charts and the boxes will line up horizontally and vertically. They won’t be the same size, but they’ll line up.


You can use the grid to draw large rectangles and subdivide them. Then you can paint them in primary colors. Very Piet Mondrian. The randomness of the grid will keep the composition from looking too regular.


Every snowflake is different. Why not graph paper?

The internet is such a wonderful thing! No matter how obsessed I think I am, with a little googling I can find someone else who already been there and done that.

Here is the sudoku pizza, with nine toppings arranged in a sudoku pattern. The picture above is the stage of construction which most clearly shows the sudoku pattern. The skewers are then removed, the pizza is topped with grated cheese, and is baked to a golden brown.

Andrej Bauer at the University of Ljubljana has a random art generator. You can type in a name and his computer will scramble the name into a computer program, which then generates the art. The process is random in the sense that you, the user, have no idea how the name you type affects the picture. All you can do is try different names and see what happens.

It takes a few minutes to generate the art, which gives you time to browser the gallery of pictures that other people created. You can vote the pictures up or down, and the most popular pictures eventually make it to a “best of” gallery.


I picked the picture above from the visitors’ gallery. Someone generated it from “doodoo galore”. I generated the picture to the left from “Regruntled blogspot”. Go figure.

Seam carving is a new technique for content-aware resizing of images. The idea is to squeeze the images without reducing them. An audio analogy would be speeding up a recording without changing the pitch.The alternatives to seam carving are cropping and shrinking. Cropping loses information at the edges. Shrinking loses detail everywhere. Seam carving analyses the picture and deletes “unimportant” information.Of course, I can’t just read about something like this, I have to download some software and try it for myself. Here is a feral cat, 400 pixels wide:

Now we progressively carve the picture.

Now the picture is half size. Ouch! The head and tail are about the same size as in the original, and it looks like the algorithm decided that dark shadows, blurry green leaves and white fur were “unimportant” information. The cat’s adorable face is preserved. Which makes a certain amount of sense. To me. Maybe not to the cat.