Transcript
Beginnings are very delicate times. And as a debuting hobbyist in digital art, my initial inspiration was found in the capabilities of the software itself, browsing through the various examples and code samples I could find on the internet.
Processing enjoys a vibrant community of users and contributors, and I spent endless hours with feverish eyes gazing at the screen, trying to make sense out of alien lines of code, and to spawn my own ones.
The initial ambition I had was to create visualisations that would run in real time, within the browser, no plugins required, just based on the CSS and Javascript languages.
In that regard, Processing offered excellent possibilities: Despite being based on JAVA, it has a Javascript publisher, which I explored extensively in the early days. One of the first outcomes, was this cute animation of the Boids, that you can see around me.
It comes with a soundtrack playing in the background, giving it a marine life atmosphere. Boids are named after an artificial life program, developed by Craig Reynolds in 1986, which simulates the flocking behaviour of birds. The name “boid” corresponds to a shortened version of a bird-like object.
Another example of mathematical explorations is through techniques of partitioning of space, such as Delaunay triangulation and Voronoi tessellations. When Georgy Feodosevich Voronoy worked on continuous fractions in the end of the nineteenth century, he was far to imagine what sort of beauty and fascination his iterative techniques would spawn a century or so later.
Tiling space has been an obsession since the remotest ages, but the emergence of cheap computing power has made this a favourite turf for the hobbyist and digital artists from all horizons.
Voronoi tessellations captivate because of their direct affinity with organic phenomena. Three parent sites office to set the stage for untiring cell divisions, based on the mere logic of equidistance. Spawn, spawn, spawn … and very quickly you’ll be losing yourself within the turbulent mazes of the Voronoi, in an exhilarating journey towards the infinitely small.
Even more sophisticated, with the right background in mathematics and physics, you can tackle advanced physical and chemical models and simulations. Using the Toxic libraries for Processing, this is an implementation of Reaction and Diffusion, a mathematical model well know in chemistry in biology.
Two important scientific fields, but also two preferred playgrounds for sexual animal species: Male and female primeval attraction heavily relies on biological differences and hormonal chemistry. Their interaction results in a complex web of innumerable diffuse chain reactions, eventually resulting in the generation of a new being.
For this reason, I chose as a bitmap seed image the Chinese ideograms for man and Woman, and ran a few lines of Gray-Scott algorithm over it, to produce this animation.
By the end of 2015, France had undergone two major terror attacks, and that pulled a few creative strings in me, on the sad and angry side of things obviously. My country was struck in its heart, in Paris, once in Charlie Hebdo, and the second time in Bataclan, an iconic musical theatre. This prompted a series of four compositions.