Structural Patterns

Soon, I’ll be launching an RSS feed featuring illustration of famous news broadcasters such as Barbara Walters. Each news broadcast personality will be set against the icon or colors of the corporation they worked for.

Through the BOMBLOG, I just launched a series of compositions titled “Helsinki Web Sketches” that combine photos that I took during a residency at HIAP with WebGL code using three.js, rotoscope animations and video. Interact with the pages and click through them to see the various sketches.

The Helsinki Web Sketches are designed for modern desktop browsers that support WebGL.

At Hunter College’s Film & Media Studies program, I teach an introductory production course in visual communication in which I cover graphic design basics, image and text composition, typography basics as well as an introduction to data visualization… The course is a medley of current topics related to visual communication. One of the lectures focuses on layout and the use of the golden ratio in art, design and architecture. As Euclid described the golden ratio: “A straight line is said to have been cut in extreme and mean ratio when, as the whole line is to the greater segment, so is the greater to the less.” We look at examples dissected by Kimberly Elam in her book Geometry of Design. We apply shapes such as the pentagon, star pentagram, the Fibonacci spiral to historical graphics such as the work of the Stenberg Brothers…

Since I cover this sort of material in teaching, I was struck by the work of Claudia Wieser upon entering her October 2013 exhibition at Marianne Boesky Gallery in Chelsea, NY. Generally, I prefer work that is socially and/or politically engaging, but these galleries presented such a beautiful twist on design elements that I found myself in a visual funhouse. Work is presented throughout the gallery on the walls and floor, not as individual pieces, but rather constellations that speak to one another. The individual elements to the exhibition are simple – geometric shapes cut into mirrors, tiles or wood, graphic elements layered on to classical Western art. She seems to effectively extract the geometric design formulas applied to traditional Western sculpture and painting and then reapply them as sculptural elements to create new visualizations.