Thursday, July 16, 2015

The Three Hyperbolic Musicians

Well how could a physicist not love today's Daily Create? We are directed to a website that is worth exploring at length, but in particular we are instructed to create a hyperbolic tiling of an image. Right away I knew there would be something perverse about remixing and distorting the Picasso image I used in an earlier assignment, The Three Musicians.

After playing with the tiling program, I began to understand how it worked, and I realized that I would have to first alter the image I had. The tiling program is sufficiently mind-boggling that tiling anything would be impressive, but I wanted a particular effect. I wanted the three musicians to be identifiable in the center of the tiling. This required cropping the original image and creating a large border around it so the musicians would be captured in the central hyperbolic polygon. I colored the border so no boundary would be visible in the central polygon. I boosted the contrast, saturating the colors a bit. Poetic justice would dictate a central polygon of three sides (p = 3), but I couldn't fit the musicians in it. I chose a six-sided polygon instead, in which they fitted nicely with the polynomial distortion. After experimenting I chose a q of infinity. Too much fun! Try the other image generators on the site too.


(The Daily Create for July 16 2015 at ds106)

2 comments:

  1. I knew this reminded me of an old Picasso for some reason... I think the distortion still fits oddly enough. It's like MC Esher and Picasso met and came up with this piece. I don't understand the math but I can see the pattern. So many dimensions...

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    1. Thanks Kirk, I like that, Picasso + Escher . . .

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