Two new pieces were added to Mark Stock's online art gallery yesterday, March 1st. Droplets #7 is an x-ray image of a blobby surface which was created by Mark's research code. The simulation is technically a radial Rayleigh-Taylor instability at Atwood number 0. The resultant figure was rendered with transparency to imply fluidity and to better illustrate the inner forms and folds of the structure.

Extruded Simplices B is one in a series of three pieces that portray extrusions at a variety of scales. By using scientific computational software to create both the geometry and image, this piece shows similarities between heirarchy in natural objects and the problem heirarchy required by scientific computation.

Two new pages were added to Mark Stock's Digital Art Gallery page recently. One lists the major exhibitions that have featured his work, along with links to the exhibitions' websites and a link to each piece that was on display. The other page is a short biography of the artist.

For the next half-year, Mark will be spending all of his time writing his dissertation. Additionally, he has a few pieces in their final development stages, and a handful of ideas for future projects. In addition, Mark is collaborating with an award-winning German video artist by providing the surface-based fluids software used for "Droplet #7." More information on these, and other projects, will appear in due time.

Mark Stock, a PhD candidate in Aerospace Engineering, creates algorithmic computer-generated artwork with both visual fluidity and an underlying mathematical basis. This solo show presents work from recent years, including pieces appearing in the SIGGRAPH Travelling Art Show and at several juried galleries and international computer graphics and visualization conferences.

The artwork will hang for the month of March in the Pierpont Commons Art Wall, at 2101 Bonisteel Blvd, North Campus, The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI. An opening reception will be held at 7 PM on Thursday, March 9. There is no admission charge, and light refreshments will be served. The gallery is open Monday through Friday from 7 AM to midnight, and weekends from 8 AM to midnight.

Tonight I took down my first solo show, which had hung in the Pierpont Commons building at the University of Michigan since April 1. My sincere thanks go out to all who were able to come to the opening, both friends and newcomers alike. I also appreciate the many positive comments left in the journal---I am currently busy responding to them. I especially enjoyed comments that said that the images were "disturbing," as fear and the unknown are two themes that I would like to develop more.

In other news, SIGGRAPH has accepted one of my new pieces, "Open House" for the 2006 SIGGRAPH Confernce Art Gallery, to be held in Boston (my new semi-permanent residence). It is the fourth year that the organization has chosen my work to hang in the gallery, and I am pleased to continue to be able to satisfy the jurors. In addition, three pieces will be on display at the Office of the Vice President of Research at the University of Michigan. Again, I am delighted to reach new viewers. I am also a recent member of the Ann Arbor Art Alchemists, a group of experienced digital artists in Southeastern Michigan.

Finally, I will defend my dissertation in late April, and after that I expect to update the web pages at http://mark.technolope.org/image/ with several new pieces and a new section on my methods. I hope you will enjoy it.

Since the last RSS update, I have released some new pieces, shown art at SIGGRAPH, and gave a talk to MOCHI, a Special Interest Group in Computer Human Interaction (SIGCHI) of the Association for Computing Machinery. I will summarize the salient points below.

First, I produced cropped versions of my work for mass dissemination as wallpaper for people's computer desktops. These images represent the highest resolution images that I've released in digital form, and they look stunning on small and large monitors alike. Here they are. They are remarkably easy to make.

In addition, two new works appear on the website: Dynamo and Droplet #7 Revisited. They are both fluid forms, but have substantially different character. While Dynamo represents the dynamic central fluid core of a star (or an abstract representational cousin), Droplet is physics-bending image of the gravitational effect on a glass object.

SIGGRAPH came and went in July and August, but it was somewhat special because it was in Boston for the first time in many years. Being able to ride the T to my favorite convention was a thrill, but walking the last quarter-mile in the blistering 100-degree heat was not. My piece, Open House was exhibited in the art gallery right next to Scott Draves' excellent Dreams in High Fidelity and right across from the Charles Csuri retrospective. I gave away all 200 art cards that I had, and another 600 that I printed on the second day of the conference.

Finally, I presented at the September meeting of the Michigan Ohio Special Interest Group in Computer Human Interaction (SIGCHI) of the Association for Computing Machinery, or MOCHI. The talk was titled "Evolving Technique in Digital Art" and in it I tracked the develpment of technology and digital art, and noted their relationships. Here are links to the blog entry, and the PDF of my presentation.

As the year winds down, plans are in motion for submissions to SIGGRAPH 2007 and the 2007 Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge, creation of a web store, and rendering new animated works. Stick around for the madness.

These last few months have been pretty exciting from an art standpoint: I finished a few new pieces, submitted to some shows and presented at another. In addition, I met with the co-curators of a new media gallery in Boston called Axiom, who introduced me to the world of Boston new media art, and expressed an interest in getting some of my work on display.

Of the two pieces that I hae recently completed, one is already on the website: Green Streamlines and the other--completely different from my existing work--will be unveiled soon. Green Streamlines is a resurrection of an earlier work that I wasn't satisfied with originally. It's interesting how only digital artists can return to an old subject and find it untouched by time, and ready to be born anew. Maybe I won't say such things after all of my hard drives eventually fail.

In January and February, Dynamo and Green Tendril were in Electronic Arts IV at the Scarfone/Hartley Gallery at the University of Tampa. Both pieces can be seen at the top of this article from the UT web site. The curators liked Dynamo so much, that they decided to add it to the collection at UT. I was only happy to oblige.

Finally, the Office of the Vice President of Research at the University of Michigan, my alma mater, decided to continue showing three of my pieces: Red Streamlines, Droplet no. 7, and Extruded Simplices B. They tell me that they very frequently get compliments on the works.

In the near future, I will find out if I can continue my run at SIGGRAPH and exhibit work there for five of six consecutive years. In addition, I will release a short video on YouTube, submit to some more shows, and create some interesting software. Stay tuned, or more accurately, stay fed.

Good news! I heard back positively from the SIGGRAPH Art Gallery jury, and both Dynamo and Green Streamlines will be displayed in the gallery and appear in the proceedings. This marks the fifth time my work will have appeared at SIGGRAPH, the premier computer graphics convention. It is a reputation-building trend that I aim to continue. SIGGRAPH will occur in July/August in San Diego.

The one submission that SIGGRAPH didn't accept is my newest piece, and a departure from previous work in that it is not a three-dimensional rendering. The new piece is Midnight in the Bathtub of Good and Evil, and is a frame from a very large two-dimensional fluid calculation using a new, unpublished method of mine. The tiny image on the web page does not do justice to the incredible detail contained in the image. You will simply have to wait until it is printed to witness the complexity in such a simple simulation.

Open House is currently showing at COLLISIONeleven, a juried show at the MIT Stata center, until May 1st. The piece was chosen for the show's promotional material. The show is being put on by COLLISIONcollective, an area group of new media artists and scientists. I am ashamed that I hadn't discovered the group when I moved to Boston two years ago.

The HiPerWall project at the University of California at Irvine consists of fifty Apple Cinema Display monitors connected together and supports a full resolution of 25,600 x 8000. It is for that reason that I contacted them recently to propose showing my work (which is often rendered at 36,000 x 36,000 pixels). They agreed, and pictures of Red Streamlines now appear on their website. We are working now to display my fluid animations at these high resolutions. Look for more on this in the next month.

Finally, I am happy to report a second art leasing client. In addition to three pieces on display at the Office of the Vice President for Research at the University of Michigan, four pieces are being leased by RDVO, a design firm in Somerville, MA, arranged through Boston Cyberarts.

These past months have allowed me substantial time and energy to devote to creating time-based digital artwork. It has been exciting to see my familiar forms, which have always been rendered in freeze-frame, displayed with their full (fluid) dynamics. In the last few months I have developed several methods to assist in the creation of these animations, giving me a newfound respect for digital filmmakers. My tools differ substantially from theirs, though, because I continue to make all of my imagery with homegrown command-line software. In that respect, I create digital imagery in a more traditional method...where traditional means pre-1980's JPL-style!

My first full creation is a 4:20 piece called "Smoke Water Fire," which will make its debut at the Summer Street Solstice Art Celebration held at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center on Thursday, June 21. The animation focuses on the motion of a fluid substance by modeling it as a collection of sticks and not as any specific fluid. Lacking context, only the motion remains. This illustrates the common mathematical underpinnings of the dynamics of many common fluids such as smoke, water, or fire. Watch "Smoke Water Fire" at YouTube, or in front of my apartment.

One frame of the geometry in "Smoke Water Fire" is reused in a still image that I am currently developing. The piece has no title yet, and you can see a small version of it here.

The last bit of news is that I submitted an image to the NSF's Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge for 2007. The image is of the detailed vorticies trailing from the edges of an oblate spheroid. There is a low-resolution version here. This image is typical of the quality that I aim for when creating graphics for scientific publications. Winners will be announced in September and their images published in Science magazine.

The last few months have seen creation of a few new works, some new show submissions, and a grant application. SIGGRAPH came and went, though I was unable to attend the festivities in Los Angeles. I am happy to say, though, that my participation in the SIGGRAPH Art Gallery this year has generated more interest and sales than it had previously. In other news, I have found a local framer whose work I am happy with, and I will be using them to decrease production and delivery times.

I just recently shipped two works, Open House and Midnight in the Bathtub of Good and Evil to ASCI Digital 07: Pattern-Finding, the organization's 9th Annual International Exhibition of Digital Prints. It will be held in the Walter LeCroy Gallery at the New York Hall of Science from October 6, 2007 to January 27, 2008. An opening reception will be held on October 27 from 3-5pm. I was one of 23 artists selected from 116 entries to participate in the show, my first with ASCI.

I am producing a new series of work based on line drawing. The data is still from my computational fluid dynamics research and the production methods are still digital, but I plan to experiment with a more traditional presentation aesthetic---using real (not photographic) paper and inks. Here is a detail preview (click on the image to see the full-frame version):

Finally, promotional efforts have increased this month, including new memberships in YLEM: Artists Using Science and Technology, Art and Science Collaborations, Inc., and updates to my personal pages on the art web sites Rhizome.org and DeviantArt.