Aelyn Belyn book

A Maze in Multiple Dimensions

A maze.
A fictional place made reality. A real place becoming fictional.
Looping and doubling.
Deja vu.
A parallel universe.

Maze at Traquair House.
March 2011

Mise-en-Abyme

From Daimler Galery lift in Berlin
Mise-en-Abyme.
From the French meaning "place into infinity"
Lift goes up and down several stories, and horizontally for ever.

Looking at Things only Bigger.

Photographs taken on 11/4/2011 using a Konus Digimax-90 telescope.

The Moon was half full.

The Moon Milk Gatherers

Now, you will ask me what in he world we went up on the Moon for; I'll explain to you. We went to collect the milk, with a big spoon and a bucket. Moon-milk was very thick, like a kind of cream cheese. It formed in the crevices between one scale and the next, through the fermentation of various bodies and substances of terrestrial origin which had flown up from the prairies and forests and lakes, as the Moon sailed over them. It was composed chiefly of vegetal juices, tadpoles, bitumen, lentils, honey, starch crystals, sturgeon eggs, moulds, pollens, gelatinous matter, worms, resins, pepper, mineral salts, combustion residue. You had only to dip the spoon under the scales that covered the Moon's scabby terrain, and you brought it out filled with that precious muck. Not in the pure state, obviously; there was a lot of refuse. In the fermentation (which took place as the Moon passed over the expanses of hot air above the deserts) not all the bodies melted; some remained stuck in it: fingernails and cartilage, bolts, sea horses, nuts and peduncles, shards of crockery, fish hooks, at times even a comb. So this paste, after it was collected, had to be refined, filtered. But that wasn't the difficulty: the hard part was transporting it down to Earth. This is how we did it: we hurled each spoonful into the air with both hands, using the spoon as a catapult. The cheese flew, and if we had thrown it hard enough, it stuck to the ceiling, I mean the surface of the sea. Once there, it floated, and it was easy enough to pull it into the boat.

Exerpt from The Distance of the Moon, The Complete Cosmicomics
Italo Calvino

Flight 6607

"Standing before costly objects of technological beauty, we may be tempted to reject the possibility of awe, for fear that we could grow stupid through admiration. We may feel at risk of becoming overimpressed by architecture and engineering, of being dumbstruck by the Bombardier trains that progress driverlessly between satellites or by the General Electrid GE90 engines that hang lightly off the composite wings of a Boeing 777 bound for Seoul.
And yet to refuse to be awed at all might in the end be merely another kind of foolishness. In a world full of chaos and irregularity, the terminal seemed a worthy and intriguing refuge of elegance and logic."

A Week at the Airport : A Heathrow Diary

Alain De Botton

MagISStra Mission

MagISStra Mission Website here.
Note the 3D photography STILL being used in space exploration.
More amazing photo's on the MagISStra's flickr page here.

Gemini 6 and 7

Gemini 6 and 7 launched from earth to meet in space 257km above the earth.

Gemini 6 as seen by Gemini 7 (photograph)

December 15th, 1965

On having two eyes.

A Statement for a Semi-fictitious Organisation for People with Two Eyes.

Everything we see, we see twice. Everything is two images. Left eye, right eye. Our brains turn these two coincidental images into a single three dimensional image. Cover one eye and the world shifts.

The world around us is three dimensional. The world in film is two dimensional. So why should we want our two dimensional to be three dimensional?

When a 3D object leaps from the screen, your eyes turn slightly inwards to converge on it, but your lens stays focused on the light from the screen. This conflict can cause nausea. 1

Mars landers are fitted with stereoscopic cameras and therefore the images they send back can be used to make red/blue anaglyph 3D images. The phenomenal and the naff collide.

Concurrent. Synchronous. Coincident. Simultaneous. Blink.

“Two identical, adjacent, battery-operated clocks were initially set to the same time, but, with time, they will inevitably fall out of sync.” (see fig. 1)

A stereoscopic photograph of the sky taken on a clear day from planet earth. A three dimensional photograph of a blank surface that goes on forever. (see fig. 2)

Two stereoscopic photographs taken from an aeroplane flying at approximately thirty six thousand feet. One looking up and one looking down. (see fig. 3)

Everything is two images.

Window Seats

The most important thing about these photographs, is that everybody has them.



A blogfull here...

And these were taken by my sister on her recent travels to so very far away...