(S)Ketch Up and The Landscraper

The long awaited hive photos have made their way into the Inter-tubes! You don't have to say it - I already know. You are BURSTING with excitement. Click here for the photoset. I don't have a shot of the final final product but I assure you, it is very huggable. I was having trouble with how to display it, but after seeing Art in the Garden yesterday, climbing a tree and hanging it up doesn't seem so ridiculous. 

Aaand here's a little preview of my Sketch Up 3-D text thing. I spend HOURS on this because the program goes slower than a snail on sedatives, and it's still not done. I will eventually color it and stuff. My name was going to be too long (though I probably spent the same amount of time trying to move that dumb sphere around) and I couldn't think of any other words but this one.

Those hexagons are so cool but so annoying to make. I used the polygon tool but I had to wait for both that one and the push/pull one to work.  No fun.

Anyways, digiscapes? I wanted to make a landscape with an unconventional view, so I decided on an underground landscape. I was thinking about worms and stuff buried under the surface, and a few people mentioned ant colonies/ant farms. So great, more bugs. For at least one of the prints, I'm going to orient the paper vertically with the

 "horizon line" on the very top so you can see how deep the colony goes beneath the grass. Other ones might be looking down a tunnel or a horizontal

 cross section of the grass and dirt underneath. 

At Florida State, some researchers did casts of ant colonies (they got the ants out first) and they are really neat! There are more pictures if you follow the link and scroll down to the bottom. The paper mentions "ant hotels," which would be a fun concept to play with. I guess they made artificial chambers to test the depth preference of younger and older ants. Also, Dominick coined the term "Landscraper," which is so awesome that I've made it the working title for this project.

As for the execution, this is the first thing I thought of when Jennifer first described the project. The video is a teaser/demo of an awesome video game with a rotating landscape made of what looks like cut paper pieces. I love all the textures and would like to incorporate something similar into my digiscape, using scanned textures of found objects and craft items like yarn and fabric.

And Yet It Moves Teaser from mml on Vimeo.

Also, speaking of depth, here is xkcd's take on it. I seem to remember one with stuff buried, including dinosaur bones. Does anyone remember that one or know which one it is? I can't find it.