orly?yarly

Setting up grotto

2011-11-21T23:02:00.000Z

Just some snaps of the window display coming together...

The project is located at the Chinese Arts Centre on Thomas St in Manchester's Northern Quarter. It is not going to be quite as full-on for me this year - as I wont actually be in the shop everyday and the amazing and talented Tasha Whittle (aka TXLW) is helping to run things too.

There are a few artists from last year as well as lots of new ones too - exciting!

New personal portfolio site

2011-07-02T22:32:00.004+01:00

"Horses" Acrylic on board, 2004, Fraser Chapman - New Academy London

Since leaving university my website, as it is, has been hosted on the Manchester School of Architecture server here http://www.msa.mmu.ac.uk/~fraser/. I decided it was time foe an update so I have just purchased the domain http://fraserchapman.co.uk/ and some hosting for my new portfolio. At the moment it is just a holding site, with a range of my work (like the painting above) but I plan to put together a complete portfolio and blog using wordpress to replace both this blog and the site at university. Exciting, just now I have to decide what exactly I want to do!

super-crafts website

2011-06-17T01:57:00.000+01:00

Just finished putting a website for a good friend Hass, he works out of Islington Mill and produces all kinds of cool visuals and products. The site is pretty clean and simple and is based on Wordpress so that it is easy for him to update and maintain. Anyhow, you can now check out the new Super-Crafts website

Everybody's Stalking website

2011-06-03T15:17:00.000+01:00

More web design, this time for a great little Manchester based record label - Everybody's Stalking. I actually had some of their music and merchandise for sale in the Grotto project at the end of last year, I really like some of the music they put out so it was great to be able to do their site for them. The site was put together in collaboration with Hass at Super-Crafts studio who has been doing the art direction for the label.

The site is based on the Wordpress engine and as such is easy to update and maintain. There are a few custom widgets in the build that I put together - including the YouTube and SoundCloud players. The guys at the label, Hass and I are all really happy with the site and I'm looking forward to seeing it grow with content.

You should check out the label and some of the bands they are putting out, my particular favourite has to be Melodica, Melody & Me - the track and video for 'Piece Me Back Together' are both amazing.

Prints based on Young's experiment.

2011-05-30T18:09:00.000+01:00

Had a great day yesterday playing around in the one69a studio. Jermyn had asked me if I wanted to print something as part of the studio was free all day. I put a few things together based around a series of illustrations I have been working on. The piece here is based on a diagrammatic representation of Thomas Young's Interferometer, the classic 'double slit' experiment. I am really happy with the results, especially the technicolor t-shirt and print as these where unplanned and actually the result of just playing with the design on screen at the end of the day.

I plan to sell a few of the sets of prints and tees (there are 7 diagrams in all and I plan to make 5 sets) once they are finished.

The prints here are Acrylic on A2 on c180gsm Fabriano, the t-shirts are Acrylic, medium, plain-white, Gilden super softs.

TXLW website

2011-05-27T21:55:00.000+01:00

I have put together a website for Tasha Whittle (TXLW), Tasha is an amazing artist, illustrator and high-five facilitator...Here work is really beautiful and it has been a pleasure to go through it all whist putting the site together. There are lots of little random bits to the site; the colour of links, critters popping up and simple animations. I really wanted the site to reflect Tasha's illustration style and incorporating little pieces here of her drawings, such as the colour splashes and hand written links, really help to do this.

There is actually a shop feature to be added to the site - (it will be online soooooooon!).
Anyhow, you can check out Tasha's work at her spanking new site here.

S-s-studio

2011-03-18T12:23:00.003Z

Just some snaps in and out of the new studio...

Street view, trees and better networklinks...

2011-03-04T03:27:00.002Z

Test application showing a loaded network link of live earth quake data from the USGS

I have just committed a new version of the Google Earth Plug-in control library I have been developing. In the update I have implemented support for the excellent new street-view functionality provided via the GEOptions object and the new trees layer. I also updated the support for network links within the KmlTreeView control making by any synchronous calls via the new Task.Factory Property in .NET Framework 4. This means the tree-view is much more responsive when loading large network-link chains.

The library now also uses a wrapper class to deal with all the GEOptions settings - this class, along with a few enumerations of plugin settings, makes working with the options a breeze in manged code .

The final change has been to take advantage of the new optional and default parameters, again from the .NET Framework 4. The GEHelpers class uses them quite a bit to aid generating and working with kml objects.

I had not done anything to the library for a while so it has been good to have a play around with it.

Sons of Men - Harr-cascades and digital painting.

2011-01-29T13:12:00.015Z

I have been playing around with Processing quite a bit of late to help with an art work I have had in mind for a while. Processing itself is an open source programming language and environment - it was founded by Ben Fry and Casey Reas in 2001 while both were John Maeda's students at the MIT Media Lab.

One of the key things I wanted to do with Processing is face recognition and tracking from a live video source/feed. Along with Processing I have used a number of other libraries and tools to help do this; including JMyron, Face Detection Library for Processing (FDLP) and Intel's Open Computer Vision Library (OpenCV).

The object detector I used is part of OpenCV and was initially proposed by Paul Viola and improved by Rainer Lienhart. It works using a classifier (namely a cascade of boosted classifiers working with haar-like features) which is trained with a few hundred sample views of a particular object (i.e. images of faces), these are called "positive examples" along with "negative examples" which are any arbitrary images of the same size.

You can see a quick test screen-capture of the Processing sketch here. Obviously this is at really low frame-rate/quality. The apple in the video is being tracked to my face in real time from a web-cam feed. One thing I really like the idea of is subverting the technology. Recognising and tracking faces to obscure them, rather than to record and catalogue them. I know Google used this method to blur out faces and registrations in their "Street View" software. The trend however is for its use in social networking sites (to find faces in still photos, to be 'tagged') and in surveillance such as city/airport CCTV and by police services.

I plan to develop this more fully over the next few weeks. If you are interested you can see the main code routine I have put together below.

import pFaceDetect.*;
import JMyron.*;

PFaceDetect face;
JMyron m;
PImage apple;

void setup() {
  size(640,480);
  m = new JMyron();
  m.start(width,height);
  m.findGlobs(0);
  face = new PFaceDetect(
             this,
             width,
             height,
             "haarcascade_frontalface_default.xml");
  apple = loadImage("apple.png");
  frameRate(25);
  smooth();
}

void draw() {
  background(0);
  m.update();
  face.findFaces(m.cameraImage());
  image(m.cameraImage(), 0, 0);
  drawApples();
}

void drawApples() {
  int [][] res = face.getFaces();
  if (res.length>0) {
    for (int i=0;i<res.length;i++) {
      int x = res[i][0];
      int y = res[i][1];
      int w = res[i][2];
      int h = res[i][3];
      if(w>50 & h>50) {
        image(apple,x,y,w,h);
      }
    }
  }
}

void stop() {
  m.stop();
  super.stop();
}

Grotto pop-up shop

2010-12-30T16:18:00.027Z

For the past month or so I have been running a pop-up shop called 'Grotto' in Manchester's Northern Quarter. The idea to open shop began when I was kindly offered the Mooch art gallery for most of November and December. A pop-up shop is always something I have wanted to do, and is also something a creative city like Manchester should have much more of.

As my own most recent work was already in an exhibition at Islington Mill and then was going on to the Working Class Movement Library - a pop-up shop also seemed a pragmatic way to quickly fill a gallery space with work. In total the shop was conceived, realised and opened in four days with a budget of less than £30 - all with the kind help of one69a.

Grotto Oldham Street - 4 days and £30

Grotto Edge Street - 1 day £2

Part shop, part gallery, part event space - Grotto has been a place for local artists to perform, or to sell their work, in the centre of Manchester's Northern Quarter. Grotto has actually had two locations in the Northern Quarter. Originally in the Mooch art gallery on Oldham Street, it moved in mid December (thanks to the philanthropic offer of Gary McClarnan from Sparklestreet Creative Adventures) to its final location, for this year, on Edge Street.

Door to the Oldham Street shop

The Oldham Street shop front.

There were a two principals I really wanted to run the project under: Firstly - to be, as far as possible, a free market i.e. not selecting products on any personal aesthetic criteria or intervening with pricing them. Secondly, not to profit from others work - only by selling my own art work in the same way.

By being a 'free market' shop Grotto allowed anyone - from students to established artists - a chance to sell work and gain exposure in a great, central Manchester, location. Further more Grotto helped to brighten and give vibrancy to the Northern Quarter. Both locations used in the project would have been 'shuttered up' for the duration of the Christmas period had the shop not used them. In some sense Grotto had economic reasoning behind it as as well - by giving a chance to local artists to sell directly Grotto kept money spent in the run-up to Christmas within the local community.

Coal not Dole, Gold on Navy, Fraser 2010

With the cuts in arts funding it is getting harder for artists to make a living. Grotto served as a proactive response to this situation - albeit in a localised way. The project worked to address the issue by letting artist profit directly from their practice. Not taking any commission from the sale of work (most institutions take between 40% and 70%) meant that many artists were able to lower the price of their work considerably whilst still making more than they would in a traditional environment. This, in turn, also meant that customers could find amazing, original, art work at low prices. In total we had 65 artists work for sale over the course of the project and the vast majority made money from their work. The range in prices for work was from 50p (for hand printed wrapping paper and cards) to £3000 (for the amazing Thomas Mills rocking-chair/library/clock).

Along with all the great art work on sale we had live performances from groups such as Monkeys in Love, Maria and the Gay and Mind on Fire Band. Other impromptu happenings took place over the course of the project such as live printing and a film screenings. I feel the project was a great success with many highlights (you can check a few of these out below). It was really amazing to work with, and meet, so many artist in such as short space of time. It was really fun too to meet the members of the public who came in to shop, browse and chat in both locations.

With all that in mind I am looking in to possibility of doing something similar (with a twist of-course!) in the new year...A massive thank you to all the artists who contributed and to anyone who helped out in any way! Also a special thank you to one69a, Mooch Art and Sparklestreet Creative Adventures for the invaluable help, support and kindness throughout the project.

Mind on Fire Band at the Oldham Street shop.

Couple enjoying Mind on Fire Band at the Oldham Street shop.

Live printing protest signs for the student demonstrations

Monkeys in Love play Grotto

Monkeys in Love play Oldham Street shop

Live printing for Stretch Disco

If you want to see yet more photos from the Grotto project you can do so here.

All about Comic Sans...

2010-11-09T19:49:00.001Z

Finally got Comic Sans in to a logo design - my work here is done...

Check out GROTTO here...

Object Lessons - drawings

2010-10-19T03:09:00.005+01:00

Here are a couple of pieces of my work done today as part of Object Lessons exhibition at Islington Mill.

Following on from the commemorative napkins I made a drawing taken from an 1828 woodcut that depicts the accident. I translated the original woodcut into a vector image and then outputted it using a vinyl cutter (with the blade replaced by a Biro). Along with referencing the disaster at the mill, with the piece I was thinking about the ways in which mechanisation replaces traditional human labour and how manual tasks are replaced by automated ones.

One thing that really struck me was the movement of the cutter head as it made the drawing, it had a very 'loom' like movement that fitted nicely with the image of a cotton mill. Hopefully I will make some more images using this process over the course of the exhibition.

Accident at Gough's Mill, 60 x 45 cm, Biro on paper, 2010

The other piece is based on the the cards from a board game called 'Class Struggle' (sounds fun huh!). Class Struggle’ was based on the Marxist beliefs of Bertell Ollman, a professor of politics at New York University. Ollman originally self-published the game, producing and marketing it himself. The cards are rather like the chance cards in Monopoly. There are some quite amusing ones and I really want to develop something using them. To begin with I have been scaling some of them up using the same drawing technique as before. I plan to overdrawn on this piece with the other cards I get as I play the game with some of the other artists...

Class Struggle, 60 x 84 cm, Biro on paper, 2010

Class Struggle (detail), 60 x 84 cm, Biro on paper, 2010

More to follow...

Object Lessons - opening

2010-10-14T19:19:00.008+01:00

I just attended the opening of the 'Object Lessons' exhibition and open studio at Islington Mill.

I am taking part in the show and produced my first piece of work in response to the collection today. It is a napkin - commemorating a disaster at Islington Mill that happened 186 years ago (yesterday). The idea was taken from a similar napkin produced in 1910 after a disaster at Wellington pit in Whitehaven, Cumbria where 136 people lost their lives. The Wellington napkins were sold to commemorate those who had died and to raise money for the dead men’s families.

The thing which most struck me about the original napkins was how their materiality - their fragility - was at odds with usual materials used in remembrance and commemoration such as the marble and granite of tombstones and cenotaphs.

The napkins I designed were printed, live with one69a, at the opening of the show and given out to people with their tea and cake...

Coal not Dole

2010-10-08T15:40:00.002+01:00

More ideas for the upcoming 'Object Lesson's' exhibition with the Working Class Movement Library, again working with the existing political-slogan-shirts. This design is based on the protest t-shirts produced for the UK miners' strike.

Stuff the Poll Tax!

2010-10-07T01:05:00.006+01:00

I have been working on a number of ideas for an upcoming project with the Working Class Movement Library . One of the things I have been doing is going through their collection of badges, t-shirts, posters and placards.

The immediate thing that stuck me about many of these items were the bold, powerful, statements that they carry. These items were never intended to be fashionable or desirable in the usual sense a garment is, rather they were designed to carry a message, to act as statements.

I wanted to recreate these items and I liked the idea of taking the messages of socialist struggle and putting them into consumer items. I also really like the idea of being truly retro - if the '80s are fashionable - why just pop songs and haircuts? Why not protests and ideology?

It is still very much a work in progress but I hope to develop it further during the next week or so. So far I have tried out the first design on to poster paper and a jumper, I also have a blank newspaper that I want to use to print a different statement on to each page.

The jumper here is in the University of Manchester colours, I think it looks kinda preppy!

one69a website live!

2010-10-04T19:42:00.007+01:00

Just made the new one69a website live - I have been working on it for a little while now and am pretty happy with the set-up. The main points of the overhaul (from their already great site!) were to make it easier to update day-to-day content and to add the ability to offer products and services directly to customers. Another great addition is the social media integration that was a breeze to implement. I used a few choice plug-ins with wordpress to help with some of the set-up:

eShop for the paypal shopping system
Simple Social for the email/facebook/twitter integration
WPTouch for the mobile/smart phone version of the site

Other than that the site uses the standard tags, categories and menu systems with a few tweaks here and there. I am sure there will, as with anything, be a few teething problems but all in all I think the one69a guys are really happy with it.

Bill Drummond with my shirt!

2010-10-03T11:59:00.006+01:00

Jerymn from one69a got some great shots of a tshirt I designed with one of my all time hero's, Bill Drummond (K-foundation genius) The unofficial Unconvention tshirts were printed by one69a and in the end became the official merch for the Unconvention event at Islington Mill last night. Bill was saying he had done a piece of work down by one of the canals in Manchester. When the rain stops I plan to go and see it for myself, it is meant to be a big piece of graff. It sounds impressive and apparently he went down the canal in a dingy to do it. Total legend.

Unofficial (unconvention) Jesus punk tees

2010-09-30T22:40:00.009+01:00

I was asked to do some design work for the unconvention festival with one69a recently... but unfortunately the job kinda-fell-through at the last moment...It was a shame really as there were some really good people involved in the project (Javis Cocker, Bill Drummond, Billy Bragg, etc) and some really great venues (Salford Lads Club, St. Phillips, etc).

Anyhow, the job fell through as they had no budget for the work...but as I had already done the design for the job Jermyn thought it would be a good plan to put it on some tees. As you can see the design is JC with a crown of Safety-pins (which I thought was just about irrevrent enough for a punk music festival in a church.)

Painting of the Golden ratio derived from a square

2010-09-28T11:47:00.007+01:00

"Golden ratio derived from a square" 24 x 11 cm, Acrylic on Balsa. 2010.

Just a quick painting based on an idea I have had for a while - the colours based on Super Mario on the snes...

Oldfield Road Dwellings, Salford

2010-09-28T04:50:00.004+01:00

"Oldfield Road Dwellings, Salford", 1927, oil on wood, by L.S.Lowry

"Oldfield Road Dwellings, Salford", 2010, photograph, by Fraser Chapman

one69a Westfest banners

2010-09-18T21:53:00.002+01:00

I shot the Westfest banners that one69a printed earlier this month. Luckily enough we caught the sun-shine the day before the festival, which was perfect to let the prints finish drying. The photos are at Islington Mill, on the gates and in the courtyard. I really like the shots with the 'peace' banner and the barbed-wire on the gate. The lens-flair shot is pretty good too, and is 100% in camera (no photoshop).

Chess set design

2010-09-15T20:54:00.005+01:00

I have been working on the design for a new chess set. I plan to make the set in Ebony for black and Boxwood for white. The pieces are based on an 1849 design by Nathaniel Cook that later became the standard in competition play.

I have refined the line of the main body curve on all the pieces, from the originals, to give them all a more solid look. The cross on the king is now based on St George's Cross mixed with a Maltese, or Amalfi, Cross - on the original design is a cross cross pattée. The crown of the queen has been modernised and swept to a cleaner line as have the 'ramparts' of the rook.

One of the main differences I have made is to standardise the measurements to metric. In the original design the king is 4 inches high, this is 101.6 mm - I have rounded this down to exactly 100 mm and then proportional scaled everything down by the same ratio.

I still have the bishop and knight to do but I am pretty happy with the results so far. I have been modelling the pieces in Rhino 4.0 and then testing some materials using the V-Ray plug-in. You can see some of the test renders here.

Painting of the Golden ratio derived from a Pythagorean triple

2010-09-05T14:38:00.012+01:00

"Golden ratio derived from a Pythagorean triple" 30 x 30 cm, Acrylic on canvas. 2010

I have just finished a new painting that I hope to be the first of a series based around the golden ratio. It shows a method for deriving the golden ratio using a right triangle. The colours are loosely based on the landscapes from the Super Mario games on the sNes.

The golden ratio is related to the 3-4-5 triangle in various ways. This particular link was discovered by Gabries Bosia whilst working on a problem involving a knight's move in chess. The 3-4-5 and 1:2:√5 triangles along with the derived ratio can all been see in his diagram.

Illustrations from the golden ratio in geometry

2010-09-05T11:49:00.012+01:00

I have been working on a series of illustrations based around methods for deriving the golden ratio in geometry. The golden ratio (sectio aurea) is an irrational mathematical constant (1.6180339887...) often denoted φ (Phi). The golden ratio has an amazing history in a whole range of disciplines. Many of the geometric constructs for deriving the ratio are very beautiful and I plan to develop the set of illustrations with a mind to producing a series of paintings from them.

"Some of the greatest mathematical minds of all ages, from Pythagoras and Euclid in ancient Greece, through the medieval Italian mathematician Leonardo of Pisa and the Renaissance astronomer Johannes Kepler, to present-day scientific figures such as Oxford physicist Roger Penrose, have spent endless hours over this simple ratio and its properties. But the fascination with the Golden Ratio is not confined just to mathematicians. Biologists, artists, musicians, historians, architects, psychologists, and even mystics have pondered and debated the basis of its ubiquity and appeal. In fact, it is probably fair to say that the Golden Ratio has inspired thinkers of all disciplines like no other number in the history of mathematics."

Mario Livio,The Golden Ratio: The Story of Phi, The World's Most Astonishing Number, p.61)

Here are the methods and the illustrations I have completed so far.

1) Deriving the Golden ratio from a Pythagorean triple.

This method was discovered discovered by Gabries Bosia while pondering over the knight's move (a 1:2:√5 triangle) in chess. A Pythagorean triple is simply a right triangle has side lengths satisfying the formula a2 + b2 = c2 such as a triangle with side lengths 3, 4, 5,

2) Deriving the Golden ratio from an equilateral triangle.

Let L and M be the midpoints of the sides AB and AC of an equilateral triangle ABC. Let X, Y be the intersections of LM extended with the circumcircle of ΔABC. Then LM / MY = φ.

This method was discovered by George Odom, an American artist who made several geometric discoveries whilst living in seclusion in the 1980s. An equilateral triangle is simply a triangle in which all three sides are equal - as in Euclidean geometry equilateral here also means equiangular; that is, all three internal angles are also congruent to each other and are each 60°.

3) Deriving the Golden ratio with four circles.

Let A and B be two points. Circles A(B) and B(A) intersect in C and D and cross the line AB in points E and F. Circles E(B) and F(A) intersect in X and Y, as in the diagram. Because of the symmetry, points X, D, C, Y are collinear. The fact is CX / CD = φ.

Kurt Hofstetter found this beautifully simple construction for a line and its golden section point using only compasses to draw 4 circles. (R. B. Nelsen's, Proofs Without Words II, MAA, 2000)

4) Deriving the Golden ratio with a 5-step algorithm.

Draw A(B) and B(A) and let C and D be their points of intersection. Draw C(A) and let it intersect A(B) in E and CD in F. Draw E(F). This intersects the line AB in points G and G' such that AB:AG = φ and AG':AB = φ.

Hofstetter also discovered this method and published it his 2003 paper "A 5-step Division of a Segment in the Golden Section" - Forum Geometricorum, v 3 (2003), pp. 205-206.

5) Deriving the Golden ratio with Ruler and Rusty Compass.

Draw A(B) and B(A) and find C and D at their intersection. Let M be the midpoint of AB found at the intersection of AB and CD. Construct C(M, AB), a circle with center M and radius AB. Let it intersect B(A) in F and another point, F being the farthest from D. Define G as the intersection of AB and DG. G then is the sought point.

Again discovered by Hofstetter, this elegant method uses only 3 circles all of equal radius.

Illustrations of Beautiful Experiments in Physics

2010-09-05T01:20:00.018+01:00

Some illustrations I have been working on for a series of paintings I am planning. The three I have been looking are all based around the nature and properties of light....

1) Newton's decomposition of sunlight with a prism.

From 1670 to 1672, Newton lectured on optics. During this period he investigated the refraction of light, demonstrating that a prism could decompose white light into a spectrum of colours, and that a lens and a second prism could recompose the multicoloured spectrum into white light. He also showed that the coloured light does not change its properties by separating out a coloured beam and shining it on various objects. Newton noted that regardless of whether it was reflected or scattered or transmitted, it stayed the same colour. Thus, he observed that colour is the result of objects interacting with already-coloured light rather than objects generating the colour themselves. This is known as Newton's theory of colour.

2) Young's light-interference (double-slit) experiment.

In quantum mechanics, the double-slit experiment demonstrates the inseparability of the wave and particle natures of light and other quantum particles. Young passed a beam of light over a thin plate with two parallel slits cut in it, and the light passing through the slits strikes a screen behind them. The wave nature of light causes the light waves passing through both slits to interfere, creating an interference pattern of bright and dark bands on the screen. However, at the screen, the light is always found to be absorbed as though it were made of discrete particles, called photons.

If the light travels from the source to the screen as particles, then on the basis of a classical reasoning, the number that strike any particular point on the screen is expected to be equal to the sum of those that go through the left slit and those that go through the right slit. In other words, according to classical particle physics the brightness at any point should be the sum of the brightness when the right slit is blocked and the brightness when the left slit is blocked. However, it is found that unblocking both slits makes some points on the screen brighter, and other points darker. This can only be explained by the alternately additive and subtractive interference of waves, not the exclusively additive nature of particles, so we know that light must have some particle-wave duality.

3) Eratosthenes' measurement of the Earth's circumference.

Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the earth without leaving Egypt. Eratosthenes knew that on the summer solstice at local noon in the Ancient Egyptian city of Swenet (known in Greek as Syene, and in the modern day as Aswan) on the Tropic of Cancer, the sun would appear at the zenith, directly overhead. He also knew, from measurement, that in his hometown of Alexandria, the angle of elevation of the sun would be 1/50 of a full circle (7°12') south of the zenith at the same time. Assuming that Alexandria was due north of Syene he concluded that the distance from Alexandria to Syene must be 1/50 of the total circumference of the earth. His estimated distance between the cities was 5000 stadia (about 500 geographical miles or 800 km) by estimating the time that he had taken to travel from Syene to Alexandria by camel. He rounded the result to a final value of 700 stadia per degree, which implies a circumference of 252,000 stadia. The exact size of the stadion he used is frequently argued. The common Attic stadium was about 185 m, which would imply a circumference of 46,620 km, i.e. 16.3% too large. However, if we assume that Eratosthenes used the "Egyptian stadium" of about 157.5 m, his measurement turns out to be 39,690 km, an error of less than 1%.