Rubik cubes and classic album covers by the Beatles and the Clash.

July 3, 2009 2:54 PM

It's Seurat by me. Iconic album covers by the Beatles and the Clash. Mixed media (a metric buttload of Rubik's cubes shown in Dailymotion video). (via)
posted by maudlin (10 comments total)

That's cool. This might be a terribly offensive or ignorant question, but did he actually have to solve the rubik's cube for each pattern he needed (based I'm sure on somethng pre-plotted on paper), or would he have just - as I would have done!- peeled off the stickers and switched them around?
I'm a rubik neophyte; maybe twisting the cube to get each pattern isn't quite as mind-bogglingly difficult as it seems to me.
posted by Flashman at 3:24 PM on July 3, 2009

Flashman: I am not an expert myself, but my understanding is that once you master the algorithm, getting the sides lined up is faster and easier than lining up the little stickers cleanly. I presume the algorithm for solving a cube is easily adaptable for getting specific combinations of colors rather than solid faces. And, presuming he started with pre-solved cubes as the video made it appear, he could use the same computer program that showed him the grid of colors to give him a step by step set of twists to give him that grid from a solved cube.
posted by idiopath at 3:43 PM on July 3, 2009

Very cool.

but did he actually have to solve the rubik's cube for each pattern he needed

It's actually pretty easy to start with a previously solved cube, right out of the box, and get the pattern you need on a single side. It would take about the same time as peeling and replacing stickers, IMO.

If I were him, I would've started with a scan of the album cover, pixelated it and color-corrected it with photoshop, and then planned out the entire grid on paper ("Cube #A1 has three reds across the top, and two whites...")
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 3:47 PM on July 3, 2009

Metafilter: Giving Him That Grid From A Solved Cube.

Hey - you know what goes good in a burrito? Steak, sweet potato, extra cheese and big, meaty mushrooms. If that won't get you out of bed, you can add cilantro for another fifty cents.
posted by Lipstick Thespian at 7:28 PM on July 3, 2009

Context: This is a trailer for an exhibition at the Jonathan Levine Gallery in New York. Here's a bunch of pics from the show showing all the finished albums and and other work by the artist, Invader.
posted by cyphill at 7:34 PM on July 3, 2009

Very cool. But he can't do Smell the Glove.
posted by Slack-a-gogo at 7:52 PM on July 3, 2009 [1 favorite]

not enough pixels
posted by philip-random at 8:29 PM on July 3, 2009

[This, my friends, is good.]
posted by Joey Michaels at 10:32 PM on July 3, 2009

Coming back to this thread I see that I did not articulate myself very well.

Solving the rubix cube has a simple set of algorithms.

Given this fact, I presume that it would be maybe a four hour programming job to write a script that would break an image into 9 pixel grids, and then give a coded set of instructions for turning a solved cube into each grid. This would be much less work than removing and replacing that many stickers.
posted by idiopath at 2:23 AM on July 4, 2009

Yeah, but can he do The Seldom Seen Kid?
posted by natalinha at 10:02 AM on July 4, 2009