words and images
Art and photography
I spent quite a bit of time on Google Maps’ satellite views while I was planning a trip out West, and realised that they reminded me of some abstract art I have seen recently. This led to some not-too-serious but satisfying digital experimentation. Here’s one example.
Where to share the results was the next question. In the end I put them on Green Path, my wildlife and environment blog, near reports and photos of the trip. If you like this one, follow this link to find two more.
Fitzgerald’s Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam was enormously, and deservedly, popular from the 1880s through to at least the 1930s. It is a strange amalgam of mediaeval Arabic and mid-Victorian English poetry, however, not really a translation and never even pretending to be an exact one. Lowell put it rather nicely:
The reality is that Fitzgerald selected verses from a collection attributed to Khayyam, translating them very freely and arranging them thematically into a kind of meditation on fate; but many of the verses were later found to have been by other writers of Khayyam’s time or later.
The details are now well known and Wikipedia’s article on the Rubaiyat is uncommonly thorough, so I will leave it at that in favour of sharing some of the artwork in old published editions we have collected over the years. Continue reading “The Rubaiyat – editions and illustrations”
I love my photos and I want them to appear to their best advantage but there’s a cost in download speed and bandwidth. Here I compare the quality of images re-sized in several different ways. Continue reading “Image sizing in WordPress”
If we wander into any art gallery which shows a variety of work we are likely to see pictures identified as “digital images”, but the term is problematic. An “image” is something we see, but in what ways can an image be “digital”? And what, really, is the artwork?
Technically, digital is contrasted with analogue. Analogue changes in any quantity are continuous, i.e. smooth at every scale, while digital changes are discrete, stepwise. For instance, the minute hand of an analogue clock moves smoothly and its position can be read to any desired accuracy, while a digital clock will say the time is (e.g.) 8.22 p.m until it says 8.23 p.m.
Strand Ephemera, a biennial sculpture show on our beautiful Strand, is one of the Townsville City Council’s best visual-arts initiatives.
I began recording it on Green Path long before creating this parallel Words and Images blog so I have put this year’s gallery in the same place. It’s here, and it contains links to all my posts about previous shows.