Topic: CAUSTICS
Research Plan:
- Met with Margaret
- November 14 – Preliminary prototype/sketch due
- sketch a design
- written ideas, idea map or systems map
- November 15 – Schedule lathe training? Or glass molding… Figure out what the form is and schedule training for that medium.
- November 19 – have further research done and further ideation mapped out on my imagined world and the object I want to craft
- November 25 – have attended training
- November 27 – printing my something, sketch of my object
- November 28 – Iterated prototype due
- December 3 – the object is printing
- December 4 – the info is getting more concise, the presentation beginning to crystallize
- December 6 – MUSTTT have the object ready to go.
- December 7-9 in transit
- December 11 – figure out the lighting and photograph, finalize presentation
- December 12 – Project 02 due and Project 02 presentations in class (class will be 3 hours instead of 2.5 – it will run from 11am-2pm EST)
- write documentation afterwards
- December 15 – All documentation due for Project 02 due, including a bibliography and written reflection (more info below)
***Making this research plan without a clear idea of what object I’ll be making feels difficult, but I understand the assignment is so to help us get a move on with this exact decision. For now, I suppose I’ll make one of three things:
1. a light (lamp, chandelier…) that casts caustics all over the place
2. a VR space illuminated by caustics (as if the object in idea #1 were doing the utmost in this VR space)
3. some sort of manipulation of caustics through a glass object such as:
…but not for advertisement, towards some other ends, some other world that I (we) want to manifest.
Meeting with Margaret:
Margaret helped me find articles explaining caustics as a scientific phenomenon and caustics in art, which has helpfully led me to find some caustic art inspo. Margaret also found an article about caustic acoustics that allows me to see better the essence of caustics; both in optics and acoustics caustics occur because of a pointed concentration of light or sound waves into specific places in space, creating a curved formation of concentrated waves. In both optics and acoustics, caustics displace a strong concentration of waves from the source, in a way that seems to defy normal, intuitive physics. That’s why we are so awed by whispering galleries (or grottoes). It’s as if by magic that a whisper can be heard so far from its speaker. And it’s as if by magic that a patch of light can be so bright yet not in the spot where the source’s rays first hit a surface.
The awe inspired by the phenomenon of caustics is so magical precisely because of how it mystifies our own world’s physical laws to us; it is real, but it feels impossible. It is the beauty of caustics and the awe and wonder that they inspire in people that I want to focus in on. Perhaps my mission is to create an everyday object that might infuse caustics, their beauty and wonder, into the everyday.
The lighting in our world prioritizes on knowing through seeing.
Caustic lighting might prioritize feeling. Not rendering clearly to achieve total visibility, we would have ambiguity of form and features, but beauty and magic in illumination and shine, pattern and glisten.
It would not be easy to read or write in caustic lighting, so reading and writing might not be as important in life.
Warm home lighting breeds a feeling of coziness:
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/496803402661009308/
Caustic lighting might be beautiful and illusory (illusion-inducing). Maybe illusions would not be considered illusions. Our hold on reality might not be so empirical.
Margaret also pointed me towards researching mirage and fata morgana.
Does uneven lighting confuse AI recognition technology?
“short circuiting a feedback loop” – I will look for this as I continue researching.
I have started an are.na research trail: https://www.are.na/elisabeth-schifrin-ba2vvhubkcs/caustics-ibe3md8hgsy
“We know caustics as random side effects, appearing, for example, at the bottom of a swimming pool, or generated by many glass objects, like drinking glasses or bottles. In this paper we show that it is possible to control caustic patterns to form almost any desired shape by optimizing the geometry of the refl ective or refractive surface generating the caustic…We demonstrate how this surprising result offers a new perspective on light control and the use of caustics as an inspiring design element in architecture, product design and beyond.”
“Caustics are ubiquitous but easily overlooked. Once aware of the wondrous effect, one suddenly spots caustics everywhere, for example when cast from a window to the living room wall, or from a wine glass to the dining table (see examples in Figure 1 and 2). Caustics almost without exception appear accidentally, as an unintentional, collateral presence when dealing with glass objects. In this paper we address the following question: How can the intriguing, but uncontrolled nature of caustics be tamed to intentionally cast caustic patterns of arbitrary nature? We will answer this question by introducing a design methodology that allows controlling caustics by shaping the surface of glass objects. Caustics thus become design elements. We propose a corresponding computational tool based on light transport calculations and numerical optimization.”
-https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&doi=f9f123cb41342b501e9a46f7b4cbf36ed1b63fa3
I key in on this source’s emphasis on the accidental aspect of the occurrence of caustics and how this leads to their non-noticed-ness (different from neglect or indifference) for most people.
In a world where caustics are cast all around by our lighting, we feel more connected to awe, magic, wonder.
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