daniel shiffman

It’s been a while since I published a new work. But there’s nothing like a deadline. A year ago, I installed three of my works at the Jepson Center for the Arts in Savannah, GA. Since the installation was set to run for three years, it seemed like a nice, altogether reasonable thing to say “Well, how about in a year, I come back and swap out one of my old pieces for a new one?” A year quickly fills up with teaching, working on a book, and living la vida loca. Nevertheless, here I am, a week from heading back down to Savannah and spending all day programming again.

When I first developed the two generative pieces, swarm and mosaic, I always imagined them part of a series of three. I was working on my ITP thesis, an exploration of generative systems in the production of real-time non-photorealistic imagery. Flocking. Cellular Automata. The usual. Having only one semester, I never made it to adopting their formulaic sibling, Fractals (I think I might have to name a pet Fractals some day, kind of like Freckles, only nerdier.) Looking at how L-Systems work (which we do in my nature of code class), the idea was to create a generative garden of abstract and algorithmic trees, shrubs, and flowers, growing on and about the screen, creating a nice little digital painting of the viewer.

Some screenshots and a video (first one is me, second one is my dog, Petey “Fractals” Caloyeras):

I’m not entirely satisfied with the result, as of yet. It’s nice to look at, but it’s just the swarm effect duplicated, only instead of smearing pixels with in a flocking pattern, they are smeared in a recursive tree pattern. I like to keep things simple, but perhaps augmenting the interaction in such a way that, at the very least, the viewer has a sense of “planting seeds” might improve the experience. I also intend to try some more sophisticated plant patterns, but with only one day of experimenting, keeping it simple for now. . .

Ok, so I will probably go back to using the video comments plug-in for posting video, but how could I live one more day without at least publishing one video to YouTube??