Lizzy & Mark: Week 11

Lizzy's update

This past week I started work on one of the many project mentioned earlier. Here are some images from my studio of the sketches I did of position-velocity phase space plots from one of Mark’s simulations. Also shown is a 3D model of a graph in three dimensions.

Charcoal on graph paper, position-velocity phase space graph of a portion of the simulated cosmological dark matter sheet

Pastel on graph paper, position-velocity phase space graphs of portions of the simulated cosmological dark matter sheet

Studio view showing charcoal and pastel drawings, as well as 3D cut paper model

I tried to keep things loose and gestural with the drawings. I love the effect of transparency of charcoal on paper, and used some of that in the black and white drawings to show where data points appeared bunched up or spread out on the plot.

I was also able to download the open source and free visualization software, ParaView. Here are my first screenshots from simulation data previously shared in motion form, from Mark’s update on November 1.

My collaborator suggested using a different visualization, like a surface or a wireframe, instead of dots. I will have to report back when I have success with those methods! Similar to the drawings shown above, I will work with Mark to select certain graphs to make drawings from as well as move onto printmaking, which has interesting possibilities for layering and color. Printmaking begins with the preparation of the image, so we will focus on that.

Inspired by science, printmaking, and hand crafts of the past, I was moved to find an image of the printed work of early cosmology, say by Newton or Galileo. Here is what I found, with what looks like a hand drawn etching used as a figure plate, as well as some hand drawn corrections (see left).

That’s all for this week on my part! I look forward to working more with visualizations, in the studio with drawing, and with some image prep for printmaking while Mark and I continue to work on the tetrahedral collapse toy model!

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Mark's update

I have been looking into producing gears that spin essentially like filaments would in my tetrahedral collapse model. One goal Lizzy and I have is to connect these gear units along a network, to illustrate some constraints and relationships that would happen if galaxies in the Universe were linked this way.

A bit of searching on 3D printing design sites led me to a class of gears that can be 3D printed, and seem to be useful for this task. Most (if not all?) of them are fundamentally based on a tetrahedron, even the first one, the cube:

​In fact a tetrahedron is at the center of that. Why? Consider the familiar cube (more familiar than a tetrahedron for most of us). It has 6 faces, and 8 corners. The shape formed by replacing all corners with faces is the octahedron. But replacing only half of the 8 faces (some set of 4 that are not adjacent) produces a tetrahedron (the basis for the tetrahedral collapse model, the simplest way to form a collapsed object out of a non-stretchy material in 3D).

There are several other cool models based on the same object: a heart

​and a skull!

​If you watch these and think about these, they are based on tetrahedral geometries! Since the tetrahedron is the simplest solid, imagine all the possibilities for more complicated networks of gears...