schematics

/schematics537

A channel for sharing schematics, processes, and everything in between. Viewing the internal systems of things we love.

torus-based microtonal scales (1968) by Erv Wilson
Wilson thought of the musical scale as a living process, like a crystal or plant. he rediscovered base-2 logarithms and began and explored equal divisions of the octave, coming up with scales of 17, 19, 22, and 31 tones that were especially pleasing
Diagrams from The Natural Principles and Analogy of the Harmony of Form - David Ramsay Hay, 1842
Hugo de Vries
Oenothera Lamarckiana. Variatie der Vruchtlengte, 1891
subterranean burial chamber, Rome (1652) by Athanasius Kircher

engraving from Oedipus Aegyptiacus. Hoc est universalis hieroglyphicae veterum doctrinae temporum injuria abolitae instauratio
A.A.Van Voorn,
Bladstanden (Leaf Positions), date unknown
cottage villa designs, gardens and grounds, adapted to North America (1842) by A.J. Downing
Illustrations from Elements of Astronomy - John Davis, 1868.
Cedric Price
Fun Palace Project, 1964
Andrzej Dobrowolski,
Muzyka na Taśmę Magnetofonową nr 1 (Music for Magnetic Tape No.1), 1963
The Temple of Time (1846)

By Emma Willard, the first published female cartographer in the U.S.



“In a map, great countries made up of plains, mountains, seas, and rivers, are represented by what is altogether unlike them; viz., lines, shades, and letters, on a flat piece of paper; but the divisions of the map enable the mind to comprehend, by proportional space and distance, what is the comparative size of each, and how countries are situated with respect to each other. So this picture made on paper, called a Temple of Time, though unlike duration, represents it by proportional space. It is as scientific and intelligible, to represent time by space, as it is to represent space by space.”
Illustration from Lambert's Pictorial Anatomy - T.S Lambert, 1851
Dorothy Hodgkin
Molecular Model of Penicillin, 1945
Page from The Infinity of Geometric Design Exemplified - Robert William Billings [1849]
warp machine (1984): origins of parallel computing systems

the Warp machine was a high-performance systolic array computer designed for computation-intensive applications, consisting of a linear systolic array of 10 identical cells, each is a 10 MFLOPS programmable processor reaching 100 MFLOPS peak. Warp was several hundred times faster than a VAX 11/780 class computer.

applications developed were low-level vision for robot vehicle navigation, image and signal processing, scientific computing, magnetic resonance imagery (MRI) image processing, radar and sonar simulation, graph algorithms and a low-level image library.
Lena Bergner's Weaving Technique Drawings.

'In 1943, Lena Bergner completed a suite of eleven didactic drawings depicting the components, processes, and materials of loom weaving'

More impressions ↓
Illustration from De la loi du contraste simultané des couleurs et de l'assortiment des objets colorés - Michel Eugène Chevreul, 1889
"Transference of Thoughts" (1885)

Figure from a 19th-century scientific journal. Documents a "thought transmission" experiment by Charles Richet.

For each numbered pair of drawings, one person drew, and then a second person tried to copy it without having seen it.
lines of force of equipotential surfaces (1865) by james clerk maxwell

the method of drawing lines of force so that the charge of any center is indicated by the number of lines which converge to it, and the induction through any surface cut off in the way described is measured by the number of lines of force which pass through it. the dotted straight lines on the left hand side of Fig. 6 represent the lines of force due to each of two electrified points whose charges are 10 and —10 respectively.
induction in rotating spheres (1880) by heinrich hertz
hertz provides equations and solutions for interactions between magnets and solid or hollow rotating spheres. inducing magnets may be outside or inside, in the case of the hollow sphere.
multi-dimensional perceptual scaling of musical timbres (1976) by john m grey, stanford
two experiments were performed to evaluate the perceptual relationships between 16 music instrument tones.The stimuli were computer synthesized based upon an analysis of actual instrument tones, and they were perceptually equalized for loudness, pitch, and duration.

figure 1: a spatial solution for 35 similarity matrices generated by multi-dimensional scaling program INDSCAL (Carroll and Chang, 1970). Hierarchical clustering analysis (Johnson, 1967) is represented by connecting lines, in clustering strengths order: solid, dashed, dotted. two-dimensional projections of the configuration appear on the wall and floor. abbreviations for stimulus points: O=oboes, C=clarinets, X=saxophones, EH=english horn, FH=french horn, S=strings, TP=trumpet, TM=trombone, FL=flute, BN=bassoon.
the cube schematic & tvc4, edward zajec (1971)

tvc focuses on no longer the design of visual modules, but of procedural ones. and no longer on the geometry of projection, but on the grammatical rules that delimit the possible combinations of the constituent elements.

the cube schematic and program flowchart illustrations are taken from the "comp 3" exhibition catalogue, organized in 1971 by the Museo Revoltella in Trieste, Italy, and was probably one of the first exhibitions of digital art organized by a major museum at the time.
zajec & hmeljak: the cube, theme & variations tvc 59888 (1972)
left is the output, on the right is the flowchart and computer instructions
raster and chance 9 x 7 portfolio (1979) by gerhard von graevenitz
63 serigraphs created after original unique computer-generated plotter drawings, accompanied by title page, colophon text page by the artist, and a serigraph thumbnail index, housed in a custom made wooden box
Geological Time Spiral: narrowing timescale of evolution