Ground and Sound · Russell Weaver

Math art you can watch being made.

Contour Plates are maps of ground that isn't there. A seed and a few lines of math make a landscape, and the plate draws it one contour at a time.

Sound Plates are tones you can see. A round plate shakes at one pitch, and 40,000 grains of sand gather on the lines that stay still.

Each video takes one plate apart: the equation behind it, what every number means and how it was tuned, and the drawing itself, from the first line to the last. Every animation is drawn by the same code as the prints, so what you watch is the plate you can hang.

I'm Russell Weaver, a geographer in Buffalo who studies why things are where they are, and how people can share them better. Model builder and math artist behind Ground and Sound. Play with the plates at groundandsound.com. Prints, tees and notebooks are at shop.groundandsound.com.

Business and press: hello@groundandsound.com