Musical Interlude: Robert Webb’s Disconnectica

Robert Webb is an amazing guy. Burkard and I first met Robert years ago, when he began attending our public talks. Robert is quiet and un-self-promoting, but we slowly realised how creative he is. Robert has written Stella, really cool software for visualising and creating nets for polyhedra; Burkard and I wrote about Robert and Stella in our Age column, which we included in Dingo, our first book of columns. It turns out that Robert, under the name Disconnectica, also composes and performs very good music, complete with videos. Very strange videos.

A few weeks ago, Robert showed me and Burkard a couple of his music videos, based on the Droste effect and Voronoi diagrams. Robert’s Voronoi video is not yet released, but below are a couple of his Droste videos. If you’re a fan of Satie and/or Zappa then you should enjoy them. More of Robert’s videos can be found here, and his music can be found here (which you can purchase, and can support Robert by doing so).

OF INCONSEQUENCE

TREAT

One Reply to “Musical Interlude: Robert Webb’s Disconnectica”

  1. Thanks for the write-up Marty, that’s awesome! I’m trying to get to a measly 100 subscriptions on YouTube at the moment, at which point I’ll be allowed to get a custom URL, so maybe this will help.

    I’ll also point people to my music video for Somewhere Always, which has an even stranger effect, though maybe of less mathematical interest? This uses a slit-scan effect, aka time displacement. Every pixel in this video remains at its original location, but not at its original time. By taking pixels from different times within each frame, some amazing effects can be produced.

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