Latest render of an evil flower + a little poetry on shadows written in (somewhat broken) Indonesian. This is my favorite render to date, starting from trying to manifest a dream, of a fiery ghost sculpture made out of translucent white jade, but as per usual things take their twists and turns and it eventually possessed a life form of its own.
This piece was shown this eve as a MTG playmat, as part of @hammerhead_audio 's show at @mery_gates 🔥🪷💥
Singa Pendant
This one is a gelatinous-glass-amber-alabaster re-render of a central imagery in Batak Toba, the Singa. Inspo on the last slide, originally an architectural ornament. The Singa is a mythical / supernatural creature whose likeness is believed to protect individuals and communities from malevolent supernatural forces (just like Kirtimukha) and it is one clusterfuck of a species—three curved stylized horns, huge bat-like eyes, human nose, horse muzzle, long tongue, and the body is purportedly that of a serpent’s. A metamorphosed Vedic Naga. An Eastern Chimera. It is also believed that the Singa is the spirit’s carrier to the afterlife so there’s this lightness about it that I wanted to capture. But also interesting to exclusively be modelling and rendering this in the evening, I think it really influences how it all manifests in these warm honey-esque colors, just like the hue of the table lamp by my desk.
Architect’s Plummet
This render was inspired by an artifact from @metmuseum , the Architect's Plummet (equivalent to a divine plumb bob) from the Pollonaruva kingdom of Sri Lanka. It's an obscenely ornate object for the function that it served, which is to survey perpendicular lines within temples; a mundane procedure rendered sacred.
The original artifact holds the face of a Chthonic deity Kirtimukha, a demon made by and through Shiva's third eye, who ended up eating itself like Ouroboros, and has since been revered as a protective deity, appearing at the door of temples and shrines as guardian of threshold. Kirthimukha has taken many forms across South, Central, and Southeast Asia, manifesting as a being that spews—from its mouth and hair—vegetation, snakes, fire, waves, or just pure uninterrupted gargantuan fangs. It is reminiscent of the Green Man, Kala, Taotie, Barong, and Vanaspati.
This render rewrite of the original artifact serves as a continued effort to build a futurist language of Southeast Asia, that also honors centuries of transcontinental assimilation of imageries, ideas, and cultures. I had the time of my life making this render, probably my favorite one to date. It’s a celebration of creation, of fangs and claws, of heat, growth, passion, the night, the afterlife and the orange dusk sky to which I grew up.
And lastly if you’d like to support the project financially, I just minted this as an NFT on @withfoundation , link in bio ✍️
Last week at @cdfam.symposium , I publicly announced LOOP, a state-of-the-art, web-based, 3D knitting CAD software that I've been working on with some of the smartest humans on earth at @variant3d for the past 3.5 years. LOOP is for knitting anything of any complexity with any yarns using any machine anywhere in the world. A slicer and design ecosystem for textiles.
It’s truly wild to witness a group of people with 20 something esoteric fields of disciplines slowly learn the arcane language of machine knitting and then conjuring a new affordance in that design space, painterly tools that are at once intuitive and enchantingly mystic. Very very very proud to represent a brilliant, empathetic, and culturally diverse team, who believe that the future of software is deeply humane.
This software also manifests all the things that are profound to me — the power of softness; the polymorphic and protean nature of things; graphics and surfaces and field driven design; spatial computing and tactile media (shoutout @chrisnovello !); topology (thank you @philbayer for introducing me to it on 2019 NYE when we were baked off our skulls); knot theory (shout-out @anti.inc for the impossible human knot, who have also seen the finals-week-like build up towards this presentation); naming systems; transmutations; organizational culture (thank you @auroramititelu for all the conversations on it the past few years); and in all honesty just mathematics and geometry at its absolute finest.
From starting my journey in programming playing around with additive synthesis in PureData in 2015, to now working on an additive manufacturing system that is way bigger than myself as an individual, bigger than anything I can ever imagine, is a true privilege. Big shoutout also to @processingorg and @p5xjs for getting me into programming in a way that is fun and magical. Currently we’re privately deploying to enterprise clients but really excited to work towards a public release of our software that’ll soon enable distributed prototyping of fabrics and soft goods. In the meantime absolutely hit me up anytime if you wanna talk technology / software / computing / sculpture / magic / live demo etc!
When I first adopted 3 m.o. Jupiter in 2021 from a PetSmart in Long Island, she came with a little blue pingpong ball and the joke is that it was her Europa. For the next 3.5 years she was my every day. Yesterday, Jupiter left for the great feline heavens from Blue Pearl hospital, due to sudden heart complications.
Everyone has their own way of relating to their animal companion, and mine was so tightly knit to my core as a person that when Jupiter fell critically ill, I felt weak and hollow. It was the longest plane flight of my life. At the same time it's funny to think what profound amount a creature / life force can give to another when they integrate each other's habits and impulses. When you both start to understand that smooch sounds means treat, and trinkets getting toppled over means dirty litterbox. Saw her first teeth fell out. And at some point we had the same hair. You almost become one another and become a... thing (and I guess that's true with any intimate relationship). I see Jupiter as a devious, curious and chattery human-like cat, and I wonder if she ever sees me the same, a big cat who makes musical noises and paws away on a weird rectangular fold.
Jupiter had the softest, softest belly and the most beautiful cinnamon-scented banded fur that not only turns iridescent under the light -- it also dominated every single surface of my house. Out of all the shit I bought for Jupiter, her favorite toy is a green yarn. Anything above $20 is a no for her. She chirped like a bird especially in the morning, scratches me ever so gently on my cheek when I cradle her like a baby, and it's hard to fathom that now she is in the ether somewhere, and as for my part I will continue to struggle to make sense of the suddenness of it all. But it reminded me that despite the fleeting nature of things, there's something so deeply indisputable and unmistakable about the life we share with another. That because it was shared right then, right there, that life existed, and it always will.
Ciao kitty, have the most peaceful nap ❤️🌿
