Scrapbook page 73
Periodic space-filling tile motif made out of a PC, monitor and mouse for the Computer Science department at Royal Holloway (where I had previously been a member of staff) in 1996, obviously inspired by the work of M.C.Escher. The cathode-ray-tube and heavy cable going to it (which also forms the outline of the mouse), the floppy drive, chunky keyboard, and (this turns up a lot in my illustrations from this period) the rocker-switch for power on/off, now all seem like wonderfully dated technology. I’ve also included a single example of the motif (cut clumsily out of the background here) to show quite how unexpected the tiling is — that is, I don’t think it’s immediately obvious when seen in isolation that it does tessellate. The third image is a screenshot of the RHUL Comp Sci webpage — from the Wayback Machine internet archive — showing how this was deployed. In a note from the time, I recorded how difficult this kind of three-axis tiling had been to execute, even as clumsily as I managed it, and how my appreciation of Escher had grown as a result of this brief excursion into his territory. The archive snapshot here is from 1998 and the page it captured clearly states it was last updated in 1997, but the design actually went live in 1996. (Incidentally, the Beholder website predated this, because it went online in 1995 with the Concuspidor webcomic).