Jan 22 2011
Hardware
Cabinet knobs and drawer pulls are out.
In other news, the New York Times ran a nice survey article on 3D printing as it's becoming available to grass-roots users. They used an uncredited photo of my Möbius Net piece, and linked to my Shapeways shop under the rubric "odd art pieces". Well, publicity is publicity.
Also in other news, I designed a snap-fit puzzle for this year's SME Rapid trade show. It remains to be seen whether it will assemble, still less work.
Dec 20
Christmas Shipping
Please order by these dates to be sure there's time for your package to arrive:
3-day |
Monday, Dec 20 |
2-day |
Tuesday, Dec 21 |
Overnight |
Wednesday, Dec 22 |
Thank you
for an unexpectedly good holiday season. It's the best present I could ask for, and it looks as though
the Klein Bottles are just holding out.
In other news, you may have wondered what happened to this toy which I posted about last year:
It was briefly available in stores, but was recalled in mid-2010 due to issues that came up in manufacturing. It's now been retooled and will be released again next spring as the "Beebo" by Rhino Toys.
Don't tell anyone, but there might even be a sequel.
Dec 9
Christmas Shipping
I recommend ordering by these dates to make sure there's time for your package to arrive:
International |
Tuesday, Dec 14 |
UPS Ground |
Wednesday, Dec 15 |
No Blue Light Specials
I know some of you are waiting and I apologize in advance (hi Peter!), but there won't be a factory-seconds sale here this year. The seconds were boring in 2010, mostly slightly bent hypercubes, and I have many other excitingly urgent projects, and I'm just not finding the time to type them in.
Shortages
Because of unexpected publicity, I'm low on Klein Bottle Openers and Borromean Rings Pendants. I'm doing all I can to get more, and we're filling orders as they come in, and I'll let you know when these are out for the season as soon as I know myself. I'm sorry for the uncertainty – we're out on the edge of 21st-century manufacturing technology with these pieces, and this is what it's like here.
Lastly
I made a frivolous render of this piece, as it would appear carved in solid ruby:
Rendering is a trap with this type of work: it's always easier to render than to make, and with decent software the results are very nearly as convincing. It would be such fun to do more of this, but making things has to come first.
Dec 3
Next Tuesday evening, December 8, I'm giving a short talk at Mountain View. It's part of a Leonardo Art/Science Evening Rendezvous, presented by Leonardo/ISAST and SETI Institute.
Nov 30
D'oh! Sorry this site was down yesterday! Over Black Friday weekend the Klein Bottle Opener got on Boingboing, Fark, and Gizmodo, and I ran out of bandwidth.
Nov 26
And it's up on Shapeways.
Nov 18
Stay on target...
I'm working on a new piece.
Aug 13
"Rumors of my demise have been greatly exaggerated." For those of you wondering: I'm here, bathsheba.com is a live site, and yes, I'm making and shipping sculpture.
My life has taken a subterranean turn for the last while – I needed to recharge. Rest assured, I'll get back to updating the site when I'm able.
Thanks so much for your patience!
June 20
Gyroidal structures are found in butterfly wings.
May 27
OMG pressed for time. Here's a quick shot of the colored glazes that Ex One is getting with 3D-printed glass parts:
I picked up these incredible samples at Pittsburgh on the way to SME Rapid last week. The colors are low-fire leaded enamels, integrally fused with the printed glass material. They are applied as a postprocess, in a second firing, rather than as part of the printing process. So this is not as fun as voxelwise color printability would be. Will be. But it is extremely fun! Very pretty parts, and the potential for this material is all over the place. Two or three projects still stand between me and getting design time to work on it. Dang!
May 16
Bump: I'm speaking at the SME Rapid Arts & Entertainment session on Wednesday the 19th.
April 11
I'm so excited about the Borromean pendant, I'm designing things that are tiny!
This is a 1"-tall pendant to be printed in steel: you pick the two letters and there's a choice of font.
Numbers work too, I made a Zero/One pendant because it is necessary.
I'm uploading these to Shapeways because it makes them available to you before I've actually been able to get any myself. Isn't that a little risky, you may ask? Yes, it is. Passion brooks no delay! And as you all know my empire is built on customer service: if anything goes wrong, I'll make it right. It's worth it to me to have it out there.
April 6
Klein Bottle Openers are in!
I'll be speaking at the SME Rapid conference, at Anaheim on May 19. It's a (the?) big trade show for the RP industry, and they're having an "Arts & Entertainment" session this year, and it should be darned interesting. It's not especially cheap to get into, but if you're located in the LA area and are in any way connected to the business of art, I can probably get you a comp for that session – write if applicable.
Mar 31
The webinar went OK, you can watch it here. I talked some about my history as an artist, how I moved from traditional sculpture tech into CAD/CAM; then I showed part of the modeling process for three of my things, using Rhinoceros and T-Splines in different ways. Then we did some Q & A, the whole thing ran about an hour.
Mar 25
I'm doing a webcast, or it's a webinar if you speak up and ask questions, about how I work, with live demos on my design machine. It's next Tuesday, March 30, here. T-Splines, who make a plug-in for Rhinoceros which I use, talked me into doing it. It's free but you have to sign up in advance, reserve your bandwidth today! Hopefully I won't slip on any banana peels.
Mar 19
Just in: delightfully clickety 3D-printed steel pendants in a bright bronzy finish. I may have to start wearing jewelry after all.
Mar 16
Glass printing is coming online. No, wait – Glass printing is coming online! This is the coolest thing since metal printing, which was the coolest thing since lost-wax casting. You heard it here first: right now is the most incredible time ever to be a sculptor.
This test part has been glazed with a clear vitreous low-fired enamel. It's about 3½" long, made of soda-lime glass powder: recycled bottles to be exact. The one I posted a couple of months ago is unglazed, as it came from the sintering kiln. The glaze is vital because it adds strength and seals the surface.
This design is intricate inside, and it looks like the resolution is at least as good as metal, with a minimum wall thickness in the neighborhood of 1mm. There are some design constraints due to the thermal stress as parts are sintered and fired. I gather these are complex; I haven't yet run afoul of them, so I can't say much about how they operate.
Obviously the material isn't transparent – that's not necessarily impossible, but not likely right away – it is translucent, like white marble or human skin. This effect is much stronger with the glaze, you can see the light scatters through this part better than the unglazed one below. But the most important thing about glazing is (breathe it softly) color. This clear glaze shows the native material color, which isn't utterly objectionable, but there's good hope that it will be possible to use pigmented enamels to get a choice. NB: this does not mean we'll immediately have voxelwise RGB addressability, so cool your jets. Right now I'll settle for black, white, clear...plus an enamel spec and firing protocol so we can all try this at home.
Who's doing this thing? Ex One. Can you call them about it yet? Well, they said I could talk about this, so I'll guess yes; though you'll both get more out of it if you're already experienced with 3D printing. They're still working on the glazing and many other aspects of the whole process, but it's not far out, and if you have plausible models ready to go, they might like to hear about it.
A last word in the cool-your-jets department: if you're a glassblower or lampworker, this technology does not make you obsolete. It does things you can't do; you do things it can't do. It won't make your work better – please do not taunt Ex One by calling to ask how soon they can print millefiori – and it doesn't make your work worse. It's different.
Onward and upward!
Mar 2
You asked for it, here it comes: I'll soon be able to ship Klein Bottle Openers in a different finish, at a lower price.
Feb 11
I finally got the lasercut Trilo Lamp ready to sell. Photos this time:
Dec 9
The clearance sale is still on: great deals on some larger pieces.
It took an extra day to make a marginally acceptable render of this light turned on.
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Dec 8
I designed another humorous lamp at Ponoko.
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Dec 7
It's clearance time!
And I made a render of this lamp turned on:
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Maxwell sure takes forever to clear reflected light!
Nov 26
I designed this accent light to be lasercut at Ponoko:
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I'm sorry to tease, but it'll be January before this is up for sale: I have to get a pilot model and check the design first.
On the plus side, my annual factory-seconds sale will go up soon, and there's a lot of metal in that box.
In case you're wondering, I haven't given up metal printing! Just taking a break to savor developments in other parts of the 3D printing industry. It looks as though the medium is finally starting to break out, which of course we've thought before, but I think the cat has left the corporate bag for reals now. Among other changes, I have reason to hope that we'll see more new materials coming online in the next year than in the last ten – and I don't mean slightly reformulated SLA resins, I mean broad new categories of 3D-printable stuff.
Nov 14
A new piece, Ctrl-Alt-Whelk is up at Shapeways. I like this as well in person as I did on the monitor, and that doesn't happen every day.
Re the preceding news, the Bead-O will be a spring thing rather than out for Christmas. But rest assured, it's on the way.
Sep 17
Bead-O by Rhino Toys
I've been working on this, one way and another, since last December, and now it's finally here. At left below, a render; at right, a photo of one of the first injection-molded samples. These colors might not be the final choices, or the only choices, but this is mostly how it will look. I'm co-designer in collaboration with the CEO of Rhino Toys, inventor and manufacturer of the O-Ball.
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We hope to have this on the shelves of major retailers in your town, in time for the holiday season.
This toy is what's called a "bead manipulative" in the industry: the idea is that you give it to a baby, said baby slides the beads along the rails, the beads look interesting and go click, and thus the baby is happy. The next few months should tell us something about whether the babies of America will go for this plan.
Jul 17
Price cuts! All mini metal and mini math sculptures are 25% off, and the
Klein Bottle Opener has been slashed. Is 3D printing technology finally getting cheaper and more
scalable, as we've expected lo these many years? The future's a mystery, but I'm ready to roll those dice.
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I designed a new sculpture in a different style. I just finished it yesterday and I don't yet have metal – that takes 4-6 weeks – but I've put it on Shapeways so you can check it out now. |
Jul 1
A mixed bag of news this month:
The Sonoma Valley Museum of Art, in Sonoma, CA has a fantastic show of puzzles and related fine objects, Puzzles As Art, up till August 16. It's curated by Nancy Mintz of the Museum, and George Miller, puzzle prototyper extraordinary. My esteemed colleague George Hart will speak August 11.
I've added some shots here of sculptures available by request, as well as photos of a commissioned bronze that's in Illinois.
Shapeways has posted an interview of me.
I'll be at the Bridges Banff conference in (you guessed it) Banff, July 27-29. It's a hoedown about math, science, visual and performing arts, education, and crossover in all directions – in other words, big fun!
Feb 9
The University of Illinois at Springfield Visual Arts Gallery has a show up until 2/18. This is my first solo show (aw!), and it's the largest collection of my work ever displayed, including many pieces not on this site.
Jan 9
Shapeways shops has now officially launched.
One thing I want to add: you can open your own store for 3D
objects. I wasn't sure until the launch whether everybody could
do that right away, but now I see you can.
Jan 6
The 3D printing service Shapeways has
opened a store where you can upload 3D files, have them printed in a
variety of plastics, and also order other designs
including some of mine. It's based in the Netherlands,
shipping is included in the prices.
I've put up 7 designs that aren't available on this site, old and
new. They're cheap – bigger than most of my large metals,
for the price of a mini – and I hope to add a bunch more stuff
here. Experiments, things that don't print well in metal, designs
that are interesting but not to every person. That I carry
inventory requires me to keep the metal catalog stocked with the classic
designs (as voted by your wallets), and I'm thrilled to have this
chance to bring you the lunatic fringe.
This is the most interesting opportunity for 3D printing art that I've yet seen. Now you don't have to buy inventory, deal with a service bureau, commit to a technology, or even set up a site: all you need is models. It's like Ponoko but with actual technology. (But seriously, Ponoko is awesome...just I've waited a long time for this.)
Let a thousand flowers bloom.
And before I forget, thanks for a great year in 2008. It was
smaller than 2007, but with the economy doing what it is, I'm grateful
we're all still here. 2009 is looking like a winner so
far. Things we may see include a new bronzier metal-printing
material, lower prices for metal(!), an expanding glass catalog, a new
lamp or two, maybe a toy design. And it's not even a week
in. Onwards and upwards!
Nov 26
It's not that I'm not doing anything, but it's a
secret until it's finished. Thanks for keeping me going during the long news drought.
This post is mainly to say that the blue light specials for this year are up, and there's a lot of metal there. There'll be a couple more coming, but this is most of 'em.
Update Nov 27: OK, there was a lot of metal. Y'all move fast. There's still some, and there'll be another piece or two posting in due course.
Aug 8
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I give you the Klein Bottle
Opener. |
July 25
At last the 600-Cell is
up! I apologize for math models being out of stock so
much. The new pieces are going over well, and sometimes it's
hard to keep up.
July 15
I have a new math model, the Seifert surface of the
Borromean Rings.
July 2
Despite rumors, I'm still here. Actually doing
a few things. New pieces are coming soon.
The legged robot has made progress:
and yesterday took its first steps:
Then it fell down. But I think I know how to fix it....
April 28
Events:
May 1 This Thursday 5 to 9 PM I'll be at the MIT Museum with a tableful of art, as part of the Art/Science Mixer, an event of the Cambridge Science Festival. This should be interesting. It's $7.50 to get in, free for the MIT community.
May 2 Friday will be the Somerville Open Studios kickoff bike ride. Launch is 8:00 at the Somerville Museum, we'll tour the city. I'll be there with my chopper. (I'm not actually showing in Somerville Open Studios.)
Beyond that, the Hyperwerk trip went well and I am once again getting organized on the East coast. Many projects in train, more news as it breaks.
Oh, and Time Magazine picked my Quin lamp as one of the year's 100 most influential design objects, in their Style & Design 100 feature. I'm always the last to hear about these things.
March 20
Next week I head for Switzerland, where I'll be
lecturing for a few days at the Hyperwerk
Institute for Post-Industrial Design. Oh, and I'm confirmed to show work at SIGGRAPH this year.
In other news, I successfully tested the leg linkage of my walking robot:
Eleven more legs, plus a few tweaks to the cam, and it'll be in business.
March 5
A group of metal
pieces will be at the Axiom Gallery in Boston, for the Math and
Art show from March 14 through April 27.
February 25
Just a quick note to say that I'll be at the BIL Conference in Monterey this Saturday and maybe Sunday. You could be, too.
For the last 6 weeks I've worked intensively on designing a legged walking robot. I built it in Solidworks, which was a peculiar sensation after 10 years working in Rhinoceros. I'm starting physical construction now; my goal is to make it as much as possible from waterjet-cut parts and stock hardware. What remains to be seen is whether it will work. I've designed a few mechanisms before, but nothing this complicated, and I don't actually know anything about mechanical engineering or robotics. It's a bit of a quixotic project.
It looks vaguely like this, with some additional springs and chains and sprockets that aren't shown here. Also it really has 12 legs rather than 4, but Solidworks has a nervous breakdown if I try to put any more into the simulation.
February 12
Long time no write. My work is making its way: the lamps have been showing up in some rather
impressive coffee-table books, and citations online are rife. For years I've
had a pretentious bit in the manifesto about "launching designs into
the noösphere", but it's still a surprise to see it happening.
I have on the way a new math piece, of a Seifert surface on the Borromean rings:
This was computed using (among other tools) SeifertView by Jarke van Wijk and Arjeh Cohen. I found this very enjoyable.
I have been putting a lot of time into designing some mechanisms; this is a labor-intensive process in that I have no particular training or experience in that area, but I think the projects are approaching fabrication. I hope to post pictures soon.
PS You can all stop sending me links to TopMod. Yes, it's nice.
November 26
Busy times for me, but mainly in
meatspace. I've established a beachhead on the East coast,
substantial but not permanent, near the Boston suburb I grew up
in. I've been making metal and keeping my ducks in a row as the
season approaches, and taking some downtime to build a chopper.
I'd like to belatedly welcome my administrative assistant Sandra Weinstein, who came aboard in February. She's been progressively taking over the paper-pushing side of the business, and we hope will become full-time in 2008. I regret a bit the passing of the one-man shop – the phone rings on her desk now – but now I don't wonder that I felt so pressed for time before she came: I really was holding down two jobs.
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Lastly, in case you got here from the RSS feed instead of the front page, there's a new polytope in metal, and in glass a redesign of the Quaternion Julia Set, which you shouldn't miss if you like fractals! |
October 8
I'm converting all of the Ora family (Metatron/ino and
Quintron/ino) to the larger size: going forward they'll be softballs
rather than baseballs. Baseballs will still be available on
request, but the lead time is fairly long.
A shout out to retailers ThinkGeek and Edmund Scientifics – I'm proud to be represented at both places. Does this mean I'm educational now?
Meanwhile, what am I doing? I contemplate legged robots. I am also thinking about these Möbius gears (scroll down a bit to see the animation).
September 25
I've made some larger instances of Ora and Metatrino, and I'm
very happy with the change: the interiors breathe more freely now.
August 23
I will be at Burning
Man this year, camping with Automatic Subconscious at 8:00 Esplanade.
July 30
Three new downloadable sculptures
are posted, from the Colorplanes
line. This line of work came and went several years ago – the most interesting thing to happen to it was that the TV show Numb3rs bought some of them for use in sets – but it has the advantage that it's very friendly to build: anything from lasercut steel to cardboard and Scotch tape will work.
The lack of recent news is due to my taking some much-needed vacation time this summer: I've needed a break to consider where the last 10 years have brought me.
May 6
Just a quick note that there's a new molecule available in glass: Insulin. As beautiful as it is useful.
May 9
The weekend of May 19-20 I'll have a table at the Maker Faire in San Mateo, with plenty of show and tell. This is a most excellent event — you should go too!
In other news, Paul Nylander has made a wonderful animation demonstrating that my pieces Quintron and Quintrino have the topology of a triacontahedron with punctured faces. Kudos!
April 23
This week's MathTrek column of Science News is about my work.
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SLART Magazine, a journal of art in Second Life, has an amusing interview with me. At left, one of my avatars. (The spheroid, not the humanoids!) |
April 2
What's going on? Still struggling to outsource business functions and get back to the studio. Below, a tesselated gyroid (not real, just a render). The surface is tiled with green squares meeting six-at-a-vertex on one side, and blue hexes meeting four-at-a-vertex on the other side. |
It's also confirmed that in May I will be at this year's Maker Faire in San Mateo. It'll be big fun, you should go! |
February 13
| The Virtual|Tangible exhibition, of jewelry and housewares by high-tech artists, is at the Velvet Da Vinci gallery in San Francisco through March 4. A couple of my lamps are there, along with some metal work, as well as many excellent works. Phil Carrizzi's bracelets alone are worth a trip, if you're in the neighborhood! In other news, a brief review about me appeared in the February issue of Discover magazine, including a full-page picture of the gyroid. If you've wondered why mini gyroids have been out of stock lately, this will be the reason. |
December 12
| I'm mainly busy surviving the shopping season at present: orders will ship through December 19, then I go on vacation for three weeks.
An article in the December 2006 issue of Today's Machining World magazine interviews the CEO of Ex One, the company whose steel sintering technology makes my metal sculpture possible. This is breakthrough technology, and it's nice to see it finally get some press! The direct link to the issue PDF is here, the Ex One article is "3-D Thinking". My work also shows up in the Holiday Gift Ideas column. |
November 20
I've been away for a few days installing this bronze at the Beckman Institute at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. As this picture shows its axes of symmetry align perfectly with the building, which is itself oriented to the compass points, so everything falls into place as it should. The sculpture is a bronze casting 28" tall, mounted on a four-foot steel base (the black parts are powder coated). The design is based on my earlier piece Flow, which has been out of production for some time as it cannot be made by metal printing. The large bronze was funded by Bruce Wonnacott, a man of good faith and great generosity. It was cast by Steve Reinmuth of Reinmuth Bronze Studio, whose skills with mathematical sculpture are without peer. The Beckman Institute has one of the most significant collections of mathematical sculpture that I know of, including works by Brent Collins and Helaman Ferguson. It's an institution in the tradition of Fermilab: a great center for science that is fully aware of aesthetic and humanistic ideals. I'm both proud and humbled to have my work represented there. |
November 20
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The grapevine tells me that my DNA piece appeared last Monday on the TV show Heroes. Hunting up a screenshot....found one! Right after the credits. As in the ongoing Numb3rs appearances, it's office furniture for a professor – this time a rather fetching geneticist. |
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November 8
Two new Science Crystals are up. The DNA Polymerase shows a polymerase complexed with DNA and – at no extra charge – an incoming nucleotide. And the Kepler's Inner Planets model is a 3D rendition of one of the most famous scientific illustrations of history.
The metal supply continues steady: I hope to be able to meet demand, although it won't be possible to roll out new pieces until the new year. Which I'm a bit sorry about, as I have a 600-cell model set to go.
October 9
Things are looking up on the metal supply front,
and I have reasonable hopes now of not running out of everything over
Christmas. I've been able to stock up on the
larger pieces, and now will be working on minis.
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A nice lamp photo ran in the New York Times Style section last Sunday – with my name spelled right! |
August 28
The road continues rocky: there is still not enough metal. I'm working on it, also on some ID projects and business consolidation. I designed some knobs, suitable for drawer pulls or cabinet pulls:
These are renders only so far; I'm looking for the right manufacturer....
I've also been thinking about a larger lamp.
July 19
I've run into an unexpected problem: thanks to all of you, the need
for sculpture has begun to stretch the metal printing capacity that's
available. As some of you know all too well, I've had difficulty
getting enough pieces in the last six months.
Partly it's just that I've needed a lot of them: nobody expected that art would be a large and fast-growing application for 3D metal printing, but between me and a few other artists working in this medium, it's become just that. This is a big surprise to everyone from me to top management at the metal printers, and it's taking time to adjust.
A lightning strike at the printing facility didn't help: a few months ago that took out one of only two sintering furnaces, and we've just recovered from that. The thing about cutting-edge technology is that there's not much backup – in another medium there would be different facilities to take over production, but with 3D metal printing there aren't very many options.
So I apologize for being out of stock in so many pieces. For some I've had to push back the availability dates, and I'm very embarrassed about that. Getting sculpture to you is the purpose of this site, and indeed of all my art efforts, and I'm doing everything I can to make it happen. I hope that by November these supply hitches will be but a memory.
Meanwhile, I thank you all for your patience. We're seeing the birth of a new art medium here, the most exciting thing to happen to metal since casting was invented, and it's your enthusiasm and support that are driving it. Considering how fast and unexpected it's all been, I suppose some rough spots are inevitable.
Anyway, I wanted to say that I'm aware of the situation, I'm working to fix it, and I hope and expect that the supply will soon be smooth again. I'm also trying to keep the stock notices up to date, and to advise everyone whose order is delayed. If you're concerned about a particular piece or order, don't hesitate to write.
Thanks again.
June 22
Make
Magazine posted a podcast of an interview with me at the Maker Faire
last March.
June 12
At right, I've been working on a commission for the Beckman Institute at the University of Illinois. To make this piece, I dissected it into moldable modules, and had masters for each module built as ZCorp models by Roundstone Digital. Reinmuth Bronze will take it from there, duplicating the masters in wax and casting them in bronze. Below is a sketch for a multi-material design to be fabricated quite large in 3D-printed components. Whether it will be built remains open to question.
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May 11
The Mini Schwartz D-Surface is up. It is the cutest mini ever. |
May 10
A Menger sponge model is now available for download. |
May 4
There's a new sculpture up, MG. I am woefully behind in getting new work up on the site. The Maker Faire last month was fabulous, you should go next year if you get a chance. |
April 14
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Time Compression Technologies magazine ran a feature about me, with the downloadable object Spikyball on the cover. There hasn't been much news lately because I'm working hard on several projects that are confidential until finished. Hope to have more for you soon. Visit me at the Maker Faire this coming weekend in San Mateo! It's sure to be fun. |
March 23
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Here's another glass piece, a 3D fractal known as a quaternion Julia set. |
March 11
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A new crystal is up: a section of a Calabi-Yau manifold. I don't understand superstrings any more than the next math/artist, but I can report that it's a lovely, complex surface. Andrew Hanson at Indiana University provided the model. |
March 6
I've added Vorodo, a new piece in the |
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February 28
An astute comparison of laser glass and Lichtenberg figures.
I can also report that the Schwartz D-surface printed well.
February 23
I'll be exhibiting at the Maker Faire, April 22-23 in San Mateo.
In other news, this piece is in printing now:
February 21
There was a nice writeup in the book Makers: All
Kinds of People Making Amazing Things in Their Backyard, Basement, and
Garage (this is the link at the publisher, O'Reilly, but it's
cheaper on Amazon). This book springs from Make Magazine, which is
more fun than a set of chrome-vanadium Torx wrenches!
This is a late announcement, but I didn't realize it was actually news until I heard my name on GeekSpeak. (The February 18th show, a little more than 1/4 of the way through, just before the guy who trained his cat to operate a computer-controlled cat-flap.)
February 13
I'm trying a new math model, Schwartz' D surface:
It remains to be seen whether the metal print will succeed.
In other news, a charming interpretive snow sculpture from Michigan.
In yet other news, the hyperbolic project is somewhat stalled. I've succeeded in generating the right dodecahedral tiling in the Poincaré ball, but so far an aesthetic outcome is lacking.
January 25
Thank you all for a tremendous shopping
season! For the last month I've been recovering and thinking
hard about the future of Bathsheba.com: it's grown too big for me to
run by myself, and in the next few months I'll be looking to hire a
business manager.
Starting to break out of a creative near-standstill, I'm working on some new directions. Hope to have some images here for you shortly; among other things I'm beginning to think about minimal surfaces in hyperbolic space. (Do you happen to know about tesselation in H3? I'd love to chat.)
Meanwhile, I've added downloads and instructions for building Little Star
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December 15 |
November 26
This year's sale page is up –
there's some glass, galaxy bases, and lots of mini metal. There will be some pendants coming.
November 11
DNA keychains are
back – I scored a batch made of blue glass at half
price, and passed on the savings.
November 8
Steel asteroid models are now available. If I'd known how nice these would be, I'd have made more! |
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October 26
I've added a new model for download, so now everyone can stop asking me for a Möbius strip.
October 24
Mini Vorocubes are in.
October 12
Continuing to rework designs that didn't print well earlier this year. It's one of the less fun parts of the creative process: revising things as many times as it takes to make them work. Meanwhile, more TV: another steel piece appears on CBS show Numb3rs. At right with Charlie Eppes (David Krumholtz), demonstrating the show's trademark hair.
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September 29
In the gallery, I've added pictures of a snow sculpture which I worked on in 2002.
September 28
I finally made a larger DNA molecule. If I do say so, it is a stunner.
This month's Symmetry magazine, a publication of SLAC and Fermilab, has a nice article about me.
September 26
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As seen on TV! My piece Sun Star appeared on the season premiere of the CBS series Numb3rs. At left, with crime-solving mathematician Charlie (David Krumholtz). Check it out on Fridays at 10PM Eastern – there's no guarantee the sculpture will be back, but the show is fine.
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I'm working on a design like Romanesco broccoli. It's proving a chewy problem. |
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September 21
Another piece which has been knocking around has finally made it to the site, the four-part tensegrity construction Holly.
September 20
At last, a new piece! The Voronoi-network structure finished out beautifully.
I've also added a page of links to places I've been mentioned, online and occasionally in print.
September 16
Continuing to tune up the new site. I've finally added the Mini Metatron piece, and updated the page on 3D printing.
September 14
There's a new page in the Gallery for some lamps I've designed.
September 13
Had a dull week overhauling the site. I've added two models for download, and a couple of shots in the gallery of a one-off piece.
I put in the two pieces below for printing (along with plenty of art for the end-of-year season), and I'm told that the Sept. 7 piece has printed successfully in metal. That's a relief – it's always good to break a losing streak.
September 7
Hope springs eternal: I'm 0 for 3 with this year's designs, but here's something new to try.
It probably won't levitate in real life, or be made out of purple diamond either, but one must make do.
August 22
Last month's piece ran into trouble on the metal printing side...looks like I'm starting to hit the limits of this process. This is what I've been working on now:
It's a streamlined morph of the piece with the little purple balls which I had my eye on in May, a few pictures down from here. I made one instance of that, and although the result was good, it took too many hours to produce. And I think this is better, anyway.
July 7
I'm working on a new piece, this is a rough render:
I hope it's closing in. Lately I've been trying to spend more time on art and less on 'art-related program activities', but of course it's hard to streamline a growing business. It's true about being self-employed that you can't be fired, but the flip side is that it's not so easy to get flex-time, either.
May 31
Here's another Maxwell render. To make this model I started with a group of points arranged around a snub cube, then used Qhull to find their Voronoi cells. I wrote some little programs in Perl to give thickness to the Voronoi lattice, then used ZBrush and Surface Evolver to subdivide and smooth the thickened mesh. I don't know what I'll ever do with this model other than render it, but it was such an odd grab bag of tools that I thought the process deserved a note.
May 27
A rendering of that new piece I was working on, in what I hope will be its final form:
This image was made in Maxwell, a new renderer in alpha testing. Sure wish I could really get those perfectly smooth metal parts in reality, not to mention the precision-ground amethyst spheres.
April 26
Now I can finally talk about this project! Two lampshade designs were unveiled last week at the Salone del Mobile 2005 in Milan, as part of the Materialise MGX collection. I didn't get to go, but here's how the MGX pavilion looked:
And these lamps were my contribution. There's also a hemispherical sconce made from the round design, but I don't have a very good picture of it. I couldn't be happier with Materialise's execution of these, they are beautiful. I hope to have these available for sale in the next couple of months, or at least to be able to refer you to a retailer.
April 14
This isn't really a work in progress since they're already done, but I won't be able to put them on the site until I can make some more, so I thought I'd tease you by putting them here. This is a second polytope, the 24-cell or 4-dimensional octahedron. I hope to have a 600-cell to add to these by the end of the year.
Something else coming up is a 30" version of Little Star, a fabricated steel piece. I hope to have these available by about June, in a durable powder-coat finish that should be suitable for outdoor use.
March 26
Working on a new piece which will use rare-earth magnets and glass, along with printed metal. As you see it's taking quite a while to settle down.
March 8
Wolfram Research is pleased with an etching of the Feigenbaum Function which they commissioned as a present for Dr. Feigenbaum's birthday. (Scroll down in the Mathworld page to see pictures of it.)
In other news, here are some shots of a giant galaxy etching which I worked on last winter for the University of Syracuse, in collaboration with Nottingham astronomer Michael Merrifield. (Check out his excellent model of the sun!) This is the glass blank still in the shipping crate. It's 26" square by 4" deep, that black thing on top of it is a pen. It weighs well over 100 pounds.
Below, the laser etching machine at work. The job was done at Lazart, the size was no problem for their large-format setup.
The finished piece hasn't yet been installed; unveiling is scheduled for April 23.
February 25
The news this week: Team Minnesota is starting to plan a 12-foot snow sculpture of the gyroid for 2006. It takes a lot of work to get these off the ground, but I'm excited to be doing it again.
In case you were wondering where I get my ideas, I've put up some shots of my studio sheds.
February 16
This is as far as I've gotten with the Voronoi polyhedra. I'm not exactly sure what I want to do with this, but it might turn out to be good for something.
In other news, I'm working through the tutorials for ZBrush, an organic mesh-based modeler. People seem to mostly use it for sculpting alien heads, but I'm hoping it will interface with Rhino and enable some different modeling techniques from those I've been using. I'm finding the learning curve rather steep, but it was time for a change.
Something else I'm working on is jewelry: a couple of years ago I had
a line of it, but I got into trouble manufacturing it. Now the
technology has advanced, I'd like to come back to the format.
January 28
Finally! After weeks of fussing, I nailed the new model for the gyroid. If the metal printing for this works, somebody should give Extrude Hone a medal. Of course, if it doesn't work I'll be "sucking the mop", as the proverb goes. (Update: it worked fine. Go Prometal!)
I have been working on some software to manipulate foamlike structures made from Voronoi polyhedra, using Qhull to generate them. It's turning out to be rather a tough nut.
Also I'm pleased to report that the piece at right in the previous
entry has printed successfully in metal. I think I'll title it
Lazy Eight, on the grounds that 1) it's sort of 8-shaped, and 2) it
took as much work as any design I've ever made. People talk as
though art-making is all fun, but no fooling, it can be like pulling
teeth.
January 12, 2005
Well, the hologram didn't pan out. I may try a lenticular instead, but overall it's time to move on.
In other news, I
finally succeeded in assembling the first instance of my "Holly"
piece, at left below. It is rather difficult to hold the first 8
ball-bearings in place while getting the 9th one in – I used many
rubber bands and sweated a lot. This structure appeared in my
And on the right, yet another try at this piece is in printing.
This has been an inordinate amount of work, but no question it looks
better than before.
October 30, 2004
Working on a hologram, something I've never tried before.
Keeping busy on several projects: a very large galaxy for a museum exhibit to open this fall, some lampshades, new science crystals, as well as trying to get some of my own work done.
I had the parts for this puzzle printed back in May, but when they arrived
I couldn't put it together. I thought I had misunderstood things and it wasn't a stable equilibrium, but actually I was just
doing the assembly wrong. So after I finally got the piece
together I took this shot quickly, in case I couldn't do it
twice. But I think it's going to be all right: after a few more
tries it assembles reliably and stays together quite well. Now
to get rid of the rust spots and put a proper patina on it!
This piece has finally come together and is in printing:
Working on something...
Two puzzles: they may work or they may not. I won't know until I have the 3D prints in hand.
This piece has been a bear to finish, and now it's finally ready to
print. Above is a rendering of how it would look carved out of
sea-green Corian, with perfectly reflective spheres, suspended by
antigravity in a universe that consists upwardly of an endless
red-on-white grid, and downwardly of a similar white-on-red
grid. Making computer graphics
is like playing tennis without a net.
Peeling apart the single surface of Squares reveals this form, holding 24
spheres.
August 16
August 5
July 9
May 19
March 1
February 6, 2004
