In addition to the butterflies installation, the Barbarians had the opportunity to create a series of seven prints for the light box room at the Seattle art gallery McLeod Residence. Fellow Barbarian Robert Hodgin and I decided to design something that would be a nontraditional visual interpretation of our magnetism theme.

We began with code Robert had written to simulate the interactions of charged electromagnetic particles. However instead of considering the particles' position only at a single instant, we captured their motion across a series of discrete moments in time. Robert then exported these paths to me as a text file, and I set to work interpreting them in Maya. I started with a straightforward Python script to bring in his data, fitting curve geometry to the paths. From there I experimented with different looks, ultimately arriving at an abstracted representation resembling strips of paper. In several of the prints, we decided to manipulate the curves to introduce curly imperfections similar to the sort you might find in paper ribbons. The final element relied on some custom software for polygonizing isosurfaces (also known as metaballs) that friend and former coworker Hai Nguyen has been developing. The process is a bit like wrapping a piece of Saran Wrap around a set of points. I took the final resting positions of each of the particles and fed that data into Hai's software. I then took the resulting mesh and manipulated it in Maya to match the paper look of the rest of each piece.

Several of the resulting images are depicted above. The prints seemed to be well received and getting to see my work in a light boxed format was a first for me. It was also fun overhearing visitors to the gallery speculating on how we had created such intricate structures out of paper.

Special thanks goes to Hai not only for his isosurfaces implementation but also for help in getting some truly unholy Maya scenes to actually render.