2022 In Review - January & February
So, Twitter ate my newsletter archive - boo!
I won’t repost anything that’s now out of date, but I thought I would slowly go through and repost any content that I don’t want to be lost from my 2022 newsletters, and for some extra fun I can supply updates from a year later!
January
Interesting Thing I Found This Month
I *think* this depicts light being created.
I’ve been doing some research into 16th century depictions of the cosmos for a project which I hope I’ll be able to tell you about one day (sigh!)
Along the way I stumbled onto a series of hypnotic images called the Utriusque Cosmi, which is the scholar Robert Fludd’s attempts to depict the creation of the universe combining ideas from Kabbalah, Protestant theology, Paracelsan alchemy and more.
2023 Update - I probably still can’t tell you about the project that I was researching when I found this ;D I’ll just say that it got infuriatingly close to publication, and I’m hoping to still find a home for it one day!
My News
My biggest news is that my Nice Friendly Tulips Kickstarter campaign is now fully funded!
The Kickstarter was designed to create 100 entirely unique generatively created prints, featuring an image of a tulip. Although each of the elements of the tulips (stems, flowers, backgrounds etc) were drawn by hand, a computer combined them randomly to create whole images.
If you missed out then don’t lose hope - I think there will be a few spare prints available in my shop next month!
2023 Update - The Nice Friendly Tulip prints are nearly sold out, but I think I have a couple knocking around somewhere…
February
Living slap bang in the middle of the England I’m not used to extreme weather and natural disasters, so this month was notable for bringing both a storm AND an earthquake! Although I’ve missed getting out and about, there’s something quite nice about being curled up inside while the weather is raging outside.
Interesting Thing I Found This Month
Tsiolkovsky's spaceship.
For reasons that will become obvious later this year (ooh, a teaser!) I’ve been researching people who dreamed of living and working in space long before that was technically possible. A stand out figure for me has been Russian scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky.
He was born in 1857, and was home educated after a childhood illness left him hard of hearing. From his reclusive log cabin in the countryside, he grew absorbed with working out how to bring a world like that in Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon into reality.
This drawing is from his 1883 book Free Space. He imagines a spherical spaceship which is powered by ‘mass ejection’ (aka a big weighted sphere pops out the back producing forwards thrust!), which changes direction using gyroscopes. I especially love his little weightless people, who I think are also throwing weights attached to strings to propel themselves around.
2023 Update - Now I can tell you that I was researching this for Failure to Launch, a book which is currently crowdfunding!