Watching Europa Blog | Watching Europa

Watching Europa - The eBook.

Wed, 29 Aug 2012 14:25:10 +1000

In recent weeks I've been spending far too much time on the book version of Watching Europa, only to find that now, just as I have it completed and all ready for publishing, Blurb has changed its pricing policies in such a way as to make an actual print version just prohibitively expensive.

For the moment that's a sum gain for you, though, as I've decided to make the ePub version available for free to anyone who wants a copy for their iPad or other e-reader.

Even on a smaller electronic screen it looks lovely, and if you're fortunate enough to have an iPad with a retina screen, I imagine it will look lovelier still.

This is the full 64 page version of the book, with complete credits, notes and exclusive images that don't feature in the animations. It's an invitation-only deal, so you'll have to email me and ask for the link to the file.

I really hope you enjoy this book - I think it's a beautiful thing in and of itself, and it will of course make a great companion to the Blu-ray Maquette version of Watching Europa, which is coming very very soon.

If I get enough interest I may push ahead with the print version of the book, but for now, it's still digital bits.

Nano Nano

Thu, 28 Jun 2012 15:11:47 +1000

Just for the fun of it, I made a selection of 73 Europa images specially designed to run in a slideshow on the iPod Nano. If you have a Nano, email me, and I'll give you a link for the full set. Install them on your Nano, run them as a slideshow and be the first on your block to have a Watching Europa mini-display that you can take with you wherever you go. Wear it as a wonderful Watching Europa illuminated brooch!

Book!

Thu, 07 Jun 2012 16:49:29 +1000

I received a proof of the book yesterday. It looks great, but I think I need to re-process pretty much every image to get a better result. Annoying, but it will be an expensive item, and I want you all to have the very best.

Work vs Labour

Tue, 22 May 2012 14:37:26 +1000

'Work is what we do by the hour. It begins and, if possible, we do it for money. Welding car bodies on an assembly line is work; washing dishes, computing taxes, walking the rounds in a psychiatric ward, picking asparagus — these are work. Labor, on the other hand, sets its own pace. We may get paid for it, but it’s harder to quantify… Writing a poem, raising a child, developing a new calculus, resolving a neurosis, invention in all forms — these are labors.'

~Lewis Hyde 'The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World.'

Nearing Completion!

Wed, 16 May 2012 13:05:13 +1000

The Watching Europa project is almost complete.

These 13 Blu-ray disks represent the entire exhibition version of the presentation. Each individual disk contains a looping one hour sequence of four different high definition clips (and one with five) that will play together to form the final work.

The mastering elements alone - that is, the full final resolution edit outputs and their associated animation, audio and compressed files - have consumed over 4 terabytes of data. The building of the project probably chewed up at least that much again. When I started this project in 2008, that was an almost unimaginable amount of drive space, believe it or not. I'm guessing that in another four years time, it will, most likely, seem like chicken feed.

All that remains now is to master the Maquette Version with its 5.1 soundtrack, which I anticipate taking a month or so. And then it's on to finding ways to exhibit the darn thing. I suspect this might entail as much work as the creation of the piece itself. For the multiscreen version, that's not a trivial undertaking - first of all I need to aquire 13 Blu-ray players and 13 high definition screens, and then, a place to put it.

Lists

Fri, 30 Mar 2012 13:31:59 +1100

I'm now onto the editing process for the project. From some 130 or so full size renders I've honed my selection down to the 53 clips which will make up the final show. These segments will be allocated to 13 seperate BluRay disks, each running 4 unique sequences (except for one, which will run 5 - as those of you who recognized my penchant for primes will have no doubt discerned).

This process is giving me a speed lesson in compression codecs - and it's about as mind-frazzling as it gets. I can tell you, though, that the end result is already panning out to exceed my expectations, and any of you who are anticipating the BluRay compilation are going to be very pleasantly surprised I think. Much of what I planned to do is not only possible but actually reasonably straightforward, including the full 5.1 soundtrack (which will feature on the compilation release only - the exhibition is designed to work in a different way, with each clip producing its own spatial source from the monitor on which it's played).

Sounds of the Deep Deep

Mon, 26 Mar 2012 08:33:10 +1100

I've now completed the sound for each of the 53 individual segments that make up the entirety of Watching Europa.

In the same way that the images of WE are not meant to address the literal reality of Europan lifeforms, the soundscapes are designed to be evocative of the vast extraterrestrial oceans of Europa without attempting to be realistic. To this end, I've based the sound on the kinds of things we hear in terrestrial ocean recordings and tempered it with a musicality that I hope will give the sound the kind of cohesion that I've attempted with the image's colour palette.

In my studio I am able to simulate the final Watching Europa presentation by running 13 individual clip loops on my screens. I am pleased to say that the idea, which was necessarily executed in abstraction, is very succesful in practice. I wish there was some easy way for me to demonstrate it for you, but this is one experience you'll just have to witness in situ.

For those who are interested, the principle sound creation tools for the Watching Europa soundtrack were Native Intruments' Reaktor, Spectrasonics' Omnisphere and Sonic Solutions' Synplant. For environmental colour, I made extensive use of the Line 6 Podfarm and Audio Ease's Altiverb (particularly the TL Space Colors and Impressions modules). The tracks were designed in Cubase and edited in ProTools.

Prophecy, Pattern & Progeny

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 10:42:48 +1100

The March 2012 issue of Artlink features Watching Europa as part of its 'Pattern & Complexity' theme.

Curator and digital arts specialist Dr Melinda Rackham examines the works of Champagne Valentine, Mitchel Whitelaw, Tracy Cornish and myself, and the manner in which digital tools have informed the artistic aspects of the landscapes of pattern, evolution and complexity.

"Miller sees his work as a symbiosis between himself and the software he uses, rather than a linear process of cause and effect... Software sets a direction for the narrative to take, but does not dictate a fundamental endpoint. This is digital nature, where creative mutations come from uncertainty...

[In the highly rendered Watching Europa], randomly displayed combinations of strange creatures of unknown scale but undeniable beauty emerge contemplatively from purple and blue-hued depths. Watching these mysterious creatures, swirling in dusty water, communicating via harmonics, takes me to a poetic place deep within myself."

The Great Lakes of Europa

Thu, 17 Nov 2011 10:07:19 +1100

NASA announced today that geographical features on Europa might indicate the existance of bodies of water close to the surface of the ice.

Britney Schmidt from the University of Texas has been examining data from the Galileo probe which began exploring the Jovian system in 1995. She hypothesises that two roughly circular areas on Europa called 'chaos' terrains are similar to features seen on earth in ice shelves, and on glaciers overlying volcanoes.

Schmidt and her team have developed a model that shows how a plausible mechanism for near-surface water might be at work on Europa. This helps resolve conflicts between two opposing scientific views of Europa's surface, one contending that the ice crust must be extremely thick and the other pointing to apparent surface activity that indicates a much thinner crust.

Mary Voytek, director of NASA's Astrobiolgy Program said that the data 'opens up some compelling possibilities'.

Indeed.

Image credit: Britney Schmidt/Dead Pixel VFX/Univ. of Texas at Austin.

Splish Splash

Tue, 04 Oct 2011 16:11:52 +1100

Cassini's flyby of Enceladus on October 1 has returned some wonderful science, including these spectacular images of plumes of water jetting from the surface. No doubt about it now - there is an ocean under the surface of this small moon of Saturn. How exciting!

[More about Enceladus' mysteries here]

The Vampire Squid from Hell

Wed, 10 Aug 2011 09:06:26 +1000

Vampyroteuthis infernalis (literally 'The Vampire Squid from Hell') is a species of cephalopod that inhabits temperate and tropical deep sea oceans throughout the world. It has a pair of sensory filaments that makes it unique among ocean creatures and earns it the distinction of being the sole creature in its very own Order: Vampyromorphida.

The body of Vampyroteuthis is covered with photophores which can be flashed on and off rapidly in a dazzling light display intended to confuse predators. It also has the ability to eject a cloud of sticky luminous mucus filled with glowing orbs of blue light.

Just in case you thought my Europan creatures were fanciful!

Read more (lots more!) about Vampyroteuthis here.

Juno

Sat, 06 Aug 2011 11:10:07 +1000

The NASA Juno spacecraft has been succesfully launched and is now on its way to the giant gas planet Jupiter.

This mission is likely to be as close as we get to a real life version of '2001: A Space Odyssey' in our lifetimes. I find it hard to believe that anyone could visit the Juno mission website and not be completely overwhelmed by this wondrous human endeavour.

Sadly, this mission has no priority to observe Europa, although I guess that the Juno craft will be in proximity at times, and we may reasonably expect some new science to come from that.

Water Water Everywhere

Sat, 23 Jul 2011 10:29:30 +1000

Two teams of astronomers have discovered the largest and farthest reservoir of water ever detected in the universe. The water, equivalent to 140 trillion times all the water inthe world's ocean, surrounds a huge, feeding black hole, called a quasar, more than 12 billionlight-years away.

Read about it at NASA.

Parting is Such Sweet Sorrow

Tue, 19 Jul 2011 17:36:22 +1000

The Space Shuttle Atlantis departs from the International Space Station for the very last time.

I am again reminded how poignant and beautiful the act of remote scientific watching can be.

Space: The Final Frontier. Still.

Sat, 09 Jul 2011 10:21:09 +1000

A selection of Neil deGrasse Tyson's tweets on the day of the final launch of the space shuttle Atlantis:

Neil deGrasse Tyson Apollo in 1969. Shuttle in 1981. Nothing in 2011. Our space program would look awesome to anyone living backwards thru time.

Neil deGrasse Tyson The entire half-century budget of NASA equals the current two year budget of the US military.

Neil deGrasse Tyson The US military spends as much in 23 days as NASA spends in a year - and that's when we're not fighting a war.

Neil deGrasse Tyson The US bank bailout exceeded the half-century lifetime budget of NASA.

Neil deGrasse Tyson Just an FYI: Human access to space doesn't end with the Shuttle era, only American access. China and Russia still go there.

ArtMatique

Wed, 06 Jul 2011 18:36:59 +1000

I've been a beta tester for the U&I software guys for more than 10 years now. It's been an amazing and very fulfilling part of my life. When Eric Wenger and Edward Spiegel first released ArtMatic 1.0 it was a very much simpler beast than it is today, and it has evolved into a wonderful and deep artistic exploratory tool. So deep, in fact that I am sometimes deflated when I grasp the vastness of its space and realise I'll never in my lifetime be able to explore more than a fraction of it.

One thing that always bugged me though, was the name. I've said as much to the developers so it won't come as any great disclosure to them. The problem is that for me it immediately sounds like a contraction of 'automatic art' and those terms mashed together in this way is, in my opinion, a problematic pairing; the implication is that you push a button and you get 'art'.

Creative works developed on a computer already have this stigma, even twenty or so years into the full embedding of creative computer technology into our lives. The unspoken opinion of the art cognescenti seems to be that unless you are pushing around squishy pigmented physical materials you can't possibly create a thing of artistic value.

Standby...

Fri, 01 Jul 2011 09:33:35 +1000

I'm a little stymied with the render process at the moment. There's a bug in AM that causes animation renders to be offset by a rather large amount and until it's addressed I can't really continue with that side of things.

Next week I think I'll mock up some temp sound material for the clips that are posted here. It's a kind of a side-track but at least it will help me nut out a few ideas.

Watching Europa iPad Wallpapers

Sat, 25 Jun 2011 12:07:13 +1000

Those of you with iPads might like to check out the iPad wallpapers I've just put up in the shop. They're free, and are designed so that the watermark doesn't appear in either vertical or horizontal viewing aspect of your iPad, giving you a clutter-free and awesomely impressive desktop.

I'll be adding to these over the coming weeks, so be sure to drop by from time to time to see what's new.

Enceladus

Fri, 24 Jun 2011 08:10:48 +1000

NASA's Cassini probe has returned some stunning pictures that show water vapour crystallizing into ice particles as it is ejected under pressure from what is believed to be a 'salty' ocean under the surface of Saturn's small moon Enceladus.

Like Europa, Enceladus is pushed and pulled by the gravity of its planet and it is likely that this tidal flexion is what provides enough heat to maintain liquid water under its icy outer layers. NASA scientists say that the the salt-rich ice particles ejected near the surface have an 'ocean-like' composition, rich in potassium and sodium.

The ice crystal jets come from an area on Enceladus called 'The Tiger Stripes', large rifts over a hundred kilometers long tinged with unusual bluish streaks. What's great here is that the science has determined that the water cannot be simply frozen particles ejected from the surface ice itself - it must come from below it.

"There currently is no plausible way to produce a steady outflow of salt-rich grains from solid ice across all the tiger stripes other than salt water under Enceladus's icy surface," said Frank Postberg, a Cassini team scientist.

Complexity

Wed, 22 Jun 2011 11:41:53 +1000

The digital animated images in Watching Europa are not made in the same way as those that you may be accustomed to seeing in the movies. My underwater world is not modelled in 3D and then given transparency and texture through purpose-built descriptors designed especially to emulate water or light. The Europan creatures, likewise, are not built with digital modelling tools that are specifically purposed for imitating real things like jellyfish, or leaves or tentacles.

My canvas is, instead, simply a Cartesian Plane, and all the properties of the world I have made are illusions that arise from interactions of reasonably simple mathematical descriptions. It is true that I have a great deal of control over those descriptions, but an important aspect of my work is to allow a sort of 'wildness' to creep in, in order that an amount of genuine surprise informs the process.

This is possible through a powerful and somewhat counter-intuitive notion: that of non-linearity and complexity. To put it very simply, I can describe some very simple rules for a part of the Europan world but because of the vast number of interactions in my mathematical systems, it is impossible for me (or anyone) to know exactly how those interactions will play out. Not only that, but looking at the end result of those interactions will not allow you to deduce what rules were in play or what they were doing - no matter how simple those rules were.