architecture

Friday, February 16, 2007

Churches of remathematization

[Image: "Adams in Saint Flour Cathedral," a 360°x180° panorama by Seb Przd].

Flickr user Seb Przd has been re-mathematizing his photographs of French cathedrals, using a program called MathMap.
The results are delirious whorls of rock and decoration, space folded onto itself and circled round again to match up with itself at the beginning. All very M.C. Escher-esque – but nonetheless exhilirating.

[Images: "Saint Etienne Two Times," taken inside Saint Etienne du Mont, Paris; another view of Saint Etienne du Mont; inside the same church; and a final view inside Saint Etienne du Mont, Paris. All photographs by Seb Przd].

Further clicking took me through to an entire Equirectangular Pool on Flickr, and further still to a specific Equirectangular set by another Flickr user called HamburgerJung. In particular, I like his shot "Treppe."
However, even then I found myself clicking back to look at images by Seb Przd, including "On the side of the cathedral," "Don't drink and pray," and "Notre-Dame de Reims."
If you look at enough of these, though, you begin to see that specific styles of architecture are better than others when it comes to this sort of optical distortion. The old stone cathedrals of Europe are fantastic, for instance, but modern – even art nouveau – structures look pretty lame, frankly. I also think meadow shots, or straight-up landscapes, just look really gimmicky.
So perhaps we should send Seb Przd, armed with a camera and loads of film, on a six month trip through Europe, photographing every Gothic cathedral from within...
A kind of optical encounter between Christianity and mathematics.

[Image: "The Ceiling and Columns of the Cathedral" by Seb Przd].

(Discovered via MetaFilter).

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