Michael Honey

Dataviz imagewall

experiments

dataviz

~300 charts and diagrams on one zoomable wall, automagically clustered.

Chord Paths

experiments

music

A tool to help me understand chord progressions

I drew a quoll

art

monochrome face of a spotted-tailed quoll

Art Monday: back on the circular brushstrokes

art

Returning to and extending a piece I did ~3 years ago. Trying for a painterly feel in under 100 lines of JavaScript, uses p5js.

Sunset, high above the Tasman Glacier

New edition of “Work Less, Do More” is out, with a better cover

icelab

4dayweek

Flying back from Queenstown in NZ, I saw a new edition of Alex Soojung-Kim Pang’s Work Less, Do More: Designing the 4-Day Week, which used to be called Shorter.

From the archives [2014]: a speculative interview about public transport

Interviewer: Kerry Ingram, thanks for talking to us. You’ve been the CEO of Transport for Canberra for five years now, and it’s been a very exciting five years for the…

Butterfly scales tile the plane, expanding spiral

art

p5

Butterfly scales tile the plane, expanding spiral. Using p5js

Art Sunday: Untitled artwork I plan to print out and hang above the fireplace

art

Art Sunday: Omnispheric

art

Bouldering at Pony Rocks

Art Friday: Dark Pipeline

art

Art Friday: Pipeline

art

Spring in the backcountry

Art Saturday: Evolution of an idea

art

Narrabundah Hill, dawn, March 2018

Art Friday: Even More Semitransparent Rectangles

art

Art Friday: Eclipse

art

Petals in a bowl

Towards a four-day working week

I wrote an article for Green Agenda.

Security cameras for and by the community, accessible to all

Security cameras for and by the community, accessible to all

Ourofuros

art

Weft, on wall, at dawn

art

Art Sunday: Many-pointed stars

art

Art Weekend: Polyscape

art

Polyscape, Javascript, D3, SVG, December 2015

Art Sunday: more rectangles

art

processing

Art Saturday: Processing

art

Music: buy it, don’t stream it.

Streaming music services make it trivially easy to have access to more music than you could ever need: virtually the entire output of Earth’s musicians, thousands of hours…

Pictures from an exhibition

art

fjuk

We held an open studio on Friday night: Sandra presented her sound installation, Arzu a video she made using images from her previous show, and I showed a bunch of prints…

Geospheric 5: Core Sample

art

fjuk

Readying my tiny prints for exhibition on Friday. I’m showing them in groups of 16: today I’m printing close-ups of the core. Thinking I’d love to turn this into a…

Geospheric 3: Attractors, aurora, daylight

art

fjuk

The wind-pattern simulation is challenging to get right: I refactored my code to give me a more flexible way to build “attractors” – nodes which push wind this way or that –…

Skjálfandi

fjuk

In the studio at Fjúk

fjuk

Geospheric 2: atmosphere

art

fjuk

I want to explore how the earth has characteristic weather patterns, prevailing winds which go in different directions at different latitudes. (I’m not rendering any land…

Work in progress: Geospheric

fjuk

art

Iceland is explicitly geological. Earthquakes and volcanoes, mountains, glaciers, geysers, the aurora: our precarious existence on an only moderately stable rocky sphere is…

New series: Weft

fjuk

art

In general I’m interested in emergent patterns created by multiples: simple shapes or movements, iterated hundreds or thousands of times. Waves, snowdrifts, flocks of…

Orrery 6: Prints!

art

fjuk

Getting digital work out of the computer and into the real world isn’t trivial. I’ve lugged a 2.5kg projector halfway across the world, and I’ve also send six of the Diurnal…

Orrery 5: Randomness, Recoverable

fjuk

art

Stepping away from the computer as always produces new ideas. While running, I realised that I could dramatically improve my figure-yield by changing the way I randomise the…

Orrery 4: Only The Fit Survive

art

fjuk

Extending my exploration of randomness. Reducing the mutation values to two-one-thousandths of their previous values yields almost perfect figures, but nine out of ten fail…

Orrery 3: Things Fall Apart

fjuk

art

So far the only things I’ve varied have been orbital distances and speeds. What if I let orbital distances vary by as much as 1% per frame? (Images open in lightbox)

Orrery 2

art

fjuk

The Orrery project is a kind of playground for exploring parametric variation within a very tight set of variables. I’m deliberately restricting myself to a small subset of…

Orrery

fjuk

art

Ongoing work prompted by the solar eclipse in Husavik on the 20th of March. Three-body system with orbital periods defined as a number of frames with integer multipliers…

Diurnal

art

fjuk

Stills from a live-animated installation I’ve been working for the last few days. Flybys of a mathematical object, a three-dimensional visualisation, built in Processing, of…

In Húsavík

fjuk

I’m in Húsavík, Iceland, for a month, in residence at the Fjúk art centre. I’m doing digital work, mostly using Processing, exploring natural phenomena: daylight variation…

On Reading and Forgetting

I’m in the discomforting position of having the great majority of my books in storage, hidden in boxes, accessible in theory but opaque to my immediate view. I find myself…

On New Year’s Resolutions

New Year’s resolutions are nowadays considered gauche, and yet the similarities between all our wishes tell us something important. We all want to eat better, exercise more…

When the government loses the confidence of the people, it…

When the government loses the confidence of the people, it loses legitimacy.

The Way We Live Next

Short exhibition at Melbourne’s Federation Square Fracture Gallery. Design by Icelab.

Judith Beheading Holofernes

art

100k random pixels per frame: if pixel is brighter than the one below it, swap pixels. Repeat. Original .

The small rocks of your attention

Social media —Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram, whatever your thing is— fit easily into life’s interstices. It only takes a moment to check your feed, say something…

Losing control

art

Losing control.

More work in progress

art

More work in progress: magnetosphere, atmosphere, water, crust, mantle, outer and inner cores.

Work in progress for a new art project

art

Work in progress for a new art project. 25K elements in concentric spheres.

On the four-day week

Recently there’s been some extra interest in the four-day workweek that we practice at Icelab. We had a TV crew from the national news in last Thursday and I spoke to ABC…

A universal basic income

As technology advances, it’s inevitable that jobs will be lost to increasingly sophisticated robots.

What is living well?

Something I struggle with daily is the competing obligations we have to our own lives and to our world.

Readings good, Amazon bad

Sometimes you’ll get linked to an Amazon product page. Sure, you could buy it from there, but if you’re in Australia, Readings Bookstore is a way better place to get your…

Designing our lives

Code is hard but people are harder, and perhaps one’s own self is the hardest of all: it’s difficult to have the critical distance. We’re skilled at considering how to make…

Kinds of knowing

When I was twenty, an architect friend-of-a-friend designed a house where kitchen and shower wastewater ran in a stream across an internal atrium, the idea being that an…

On the permeability of the individual

We’re accustomed to thinking of ourselves as atomic, indivisible entities. I am me, and you are you, and that’s that. I’m coming to see that this is only approximate. When…

Coherent in retrospect

The arcs of our lives are only apparent in retrospect: at the time we’re led this way and that by forces we don’t understand: when we look back we discern a narrative, edit…

Two wheels good, four wheels bad

I’ve been thinking bike-positive thoughts of late, and thinking about ways to motivate people to walk/cycle/public transport their way around. It’s a challenge, particularly…