Category: art

An audio-reactive flyer I made for an event series in Brooklyn

Created on TouchDesigner using glsl, custom noise and domain warping

Music:

may in san diego is a grey time. day starts with dense fog and the sky is covered with clouds more at home in the wintery midwest.

some days, the greyness burns off and gives way to light. the feeling when this occurs is direct, intense, and exhalting, as if opening one’s eyes for the first time

image composed of a jittered color gradient woven from many (very) distorted polygons

information theory is awash in theories and frameworks dictating the precise amount of information conveyed by any given message. however, the ability of the message recipient is often presupposed and a deeply implicit assumption in many of these frameworks.

here i explore the loss of information that may occur when such an implicit assumption is made explicit and called into question

background composed of many layers of low alpha polygons (each distorted in polar coordinate space) and colored by a jittered color gradient

foreground composed of arrays of bits (arranged as columns) set to a binary value based on a pareto distribution and subsequently grouped into lines

subtle background layers partially illuminated by randomly spaced and layered geometries. recommended viewing on high contract displays (or in a dark room)

thank to sighack for some inspiration and implementation points on adding textures to images

Above:

50 concentric closed chaikin curves based on 100 radial points arranged in a user-defined pattern and randomly perturbed, with an incrementally increasing theta offset for each additional layer

Also pictured, the same design plotted on stained paper (a current experimentation) with an AxiDraw A3 machine

geography built by localized attractors acting on many particles with constrained paths of motion

each of these images are generated from a noise based flow fields variably perturbed and increasingly constrained

these images resulted from an exploration of perlin noise after getting bored with the somewhat predictable patterns.

the baseline algorithm is the same, with only the parameters for noise generating changing. particles are started randomly and have some added behaviors (such as splitting/rejoining and deviating from course) to add depth and dynamism

for those interested, some resources that helped:

• Flow Fields
  • a great overview and creatively inspiring dive into flow fields from Tyler Hobbs
• Pattern formation using Dividing-Aggregating Walkers
  • while not immediately visible in these results, and interesting and helpful in creating a generalized framework for a system of interacting vector fields
• How to make generative art feel natural

thanks to Jørgen Nystad for his instruction on a scalable high-res rendering workflow

particles are acted on by competing Lorenz attactors, arranged radially

grasping in the void

created by many iterations of polar tiling