RE: VM, illuminated and 3D
merrimacga > 17-02-2024, 12:31 PM
I concur with Aga.
Knowing the cover isn't original, that the VM was rebound much later than it was written, means anything you find there most likely cannot be correlated to anything you find in the folios. The only exception would be if some of what you are finding through Photoshop in the folios is the result of what has happened to those folios since their creation. For example, when the VM was rebound, it is likely the folios were handled with bare hands and, forensically, there would have been trace evidence left behind by such handling (fingerprints, oils, dirt, and any number of other substances on the hands that could have been minutely transferred to and possibly damaged the folios in some way). And the more bare hands that touched the cover and the folios over the years would have transferred more trace evidence. Most of this is likely to have disappeared over the course of time or become obscured by more trace evidence. But there could still be residual effects on the folios and the cover that modern forensics could possibly identify and maybe even correlate.
Were such forensics to be performed on the VM, which will never happen as such tests would damage it further.
This is highly speculative of course but no less so than the work you are doing and it does beg the question as to whether or not such trace evidence could show up in the pixels of the Beinecke scans. If so, then your work in Photoshop is also picking up these pixels and could be rendering meaningless what you find using Gaussian Blur, Dodge and Burn, not to mention your lowering of the image resolution, because what you are finding is not 100% what was originally there at the time of the VM's creation. Tantamount to working with a contaminated sample.
Like nablator, one of the first thoughts I had about your work, and I really resisted saying this before now, is that people see images in clouds too. We humans tend to anthropomorphize a lot, such are our imaginations. I found myself wondering what the results would be if you were to take the Rorschach test - you know, the ink blots that look like a butterfly or a bat, etc. Let's face it: to be a graphic designer, to be good at what you do for a living, having a good imagination is a requirement.
I see what you see in things like the more obvious leather strap and finial in your earlier examples here. And I found your speculation about objects, letters and numbers in plants interesting. I would also like to see evidence of the invisible grid you mentioned in one post. What I don't see are the golden loops, the profiles of persons, the image of Bastet, the top left corner perfect shape on the cover, the codes in the folds and the letters merging to make faces. To me, these images are too doctored, too blurred, too low a resolution after your work on them to be anything more than imagination, like images in clouds and inkblots.