Recently I have been playing around with camera tracking in preparation for an upcoming job. I have been filming my apartment and incorporating cg objects into the scene with decent success. Unfortunately the environment wasn't incredibly exciting. My apartment may be nice, but it doesn't make for the most impressive backdrop. So in an attempt to find some more captivating scenery I set out for the Mojave desert with a camera and a tripod, hoping to discover some rad desert environments that would make for a good sci-fi backdrop. My specific destination - the Trona Pinnacles.
The Trona Pinnacles are an incredible land formation located about 3.5 hours NE of Los Angeles. If you were going to Death Valley you would drive past them. The unusual spires and rock formations are known as Tufa Spires, which are deposits formed when natural springs interact with other bodies of water. Apparently, during the Pleistocene era there was a massive runoff of water from the Sierras that resulted in multiple lakes being created in the valleys of the region. The area of Trona was fully submerged under the currenlty dried up Searles Lake. Other lakes in the area such as Mono Lake were the result of the same runoffs. It was during the time when Searles lake was full that the pinnacles grew from their underwater springs. The landfroms are rather young in the global scheme of things, ranging from 10,000 to 100,000 years old. They formed in three groupings during three different ice ages. This is why there are three very distinct types of spires in the collection of formations.
If you ever have a chance, I highly recommend a visit to Trona. It is an incredibly alien landscape worth seeing in person. Please enjoy the Trona Pinnacles photo set, and look out for an upcoming video or two with some spaceships and other sci-fi things flying around the some videos of the area.
I think this area gets a lot of 4-wheelin
Vibe'n in the desert
Trona Railway
Not Trona Pinnacles but an awesome sunset on the drive home
This is one of my favorite lectures on the origins of the universe and just where it might be heading.
After watching this lecture a couple times, it is hard not to find real world examples of the shifts from low to high entropy states described by Sean Carrol. Like the title says, this is a serious nerd out viewing but incredibly interesting to watch or just listen to.
After seeing Prometheus I can't get iceland out of my head (the opening sequence was shot there). The drama of the landscapes is perfect material for creating some nice moody paintings.
This painting is a recreation of a photo that I found when doing some research on Iceland. Enjoy!
If you start to investigate quantum physics and you get as obsessed with it as I am, you may stumble upon some really interesting theories regarding the reality of the universe. One that I find to be fascinating is that of the Holographic Universe. Check out the video below for a very brief overview of the theory.
Continue reading after watching video. Otherwise the following may not make much sense.
The Holographic theory is one that becomes even more interesting when you know a rather interesting trait of how common holographic film actually works.
When you see a hologram (much like the Tupac hologram at Coachella this past year which was rad) the three dimensional illusion is created when a laser passes through a 2d sheet of holographic film. Unlike normal film used in a camera, the information stored on a sheet of holographic film does not contain a visible 2d representation of what the 3d hologram would look like, rather it has what can best be described as an interference wave pattern (it looks like ripples on water), that when a laser passes through it, the light from the laser is reconfigured on the other side as a three dimensional hologram. That in itself is pretty cool. Now here is when it gets strange.
If you were to cut a piece of holographic film, and project a laser through either one of the half sheets, you would get the same 3d hologram that you got when the piece of film was fully intact. Halve the two pieces again, and now you have 4 pieces of film capable of projecting the original 3d hologram. Cut them again and you have 8 clones of the original, 16, 32, etc. The interference pattern is essentially a fractal code, embedded at all scales with the exact information. No matter what you do to the holographic film, the same information is present at every point on the sheet. Pretty crazy!
So what does this mean for the universe and reality. Beyond theorizing that the universe may be constructed in a similar fashion (much like as is described in the video), it may also be the case that our brains have a holographic logic to them as well. This theory has been tested through an experimentation on the memory of mice.
In an attempt to isolate the location of where memory was stored in the brains of mice, biologist Karl Lashley removed portions of the brains of mice that he had trained to run through a maze (not cool for the mice by the way). He found that even though removing portions of the brain inhibited certain physiological functions of the mice, they still would retain the memory of how to run the maze. This baffled Lashley since he assumed that memory was located in specific regions of the brain. It wasn't until later when he came across an article describing the construction of a laser hologram that he made the connection and theorized that the mice brains operated in the same way as the holographic film I was previously describing. Memory, like the image on a piece of holographic film, was stored in interference patterns at essentially every location in the brain, and it could not be isolated to one specific region. This theory gained support from anatomist Paul Pietsch who initially set out to disprove Lashley's claims. He performed thousands of test on salamanders exploring the same uniform distribution of memory, and came to the same conclusion as Lashley. The mind perceives and stores information by encoding and decoding complex interference patterns.
To tie this entire entry back to some previously discussed material on this blog(see the Get Your Brain Into a Computer post from September), a brain with a holographic logic has many connections to the research that is being done on the connectome. If the Human Connectome Project is succesful in digitally replicating a human connectome into a computer, it would confirm that memory and conciousness is something that can exist as a virtual entity of pure information, much like the holographic brain model. It's some heavy stuff.
Now of course, the holographic universe is one of many theories speculating on the universe being a simulation/video game/the Matrix. The interesting thing about the holographic theory however, is that in a sense it can be tested. I will leave you with two things to ponder.
#1
In 1982 physicist Alain Aspectdiscovered that under certain circumstances subatomic particles such as electrons are able to instantaneously communicate with each other regardless of the distance separating them. It doesn't matter whether they are 10 feet or 10 billion miles apart.
Somehow each particle always seems to know what the other is doing. The problem with this feat is that it violates Einstein's long-held tenet that no communication can travel faster than the speed of light. Since traveling faster than the speed of light is tantamount to breaking the time barrier.
Sound like anything else?
#2
Check out this clip from a Through the Wormhole episode discussing theDouble Slit Experiment.
This weekend I had the great opportunity to attend the Gnomon Live Workshop. It was an incredibly intense weekend with over 20 hours of lectures from some of the best concept artists in the film and game industry. Each artist did a little presentation about themselves as well as a demo about how they aproach their individual workflows. It was incredible to see the range of approach that each artist would take to complete a project. Some would approach things incredibly methodically, with intention in every step they took, while others seemed to just fly by the seat of their pants through the process. Personally, I really enjoyed the guys that just went crazy with it (Kekai Kotaki and Cecil Kim in particular).
Here is a list of the artist that presented. I highly recommend taking a look at some of their work as they are all very talented.
Fausto De Martini
Kekai Kotaki
Anthony Francico
Laurel Austin
Jaime Jones
Cecil Kim
Ian Joyner
Jerad S. Marantz
Anthony Jones
Wes Ball & John Park
The entire weekend was inspirational, as well as a kick in the pants to get moving on some new projects. Here are a few quick paintings I did this morning and last night attempting to adopt some of the techniques and strategies from a few of the artists from the weekend. They are pretty rough and could use some cleaning up, but they was loose and quick which is what I was going for.
