Lumar-LookingOutwards03

GO TO 2 min 15 secs into the video!

Ἁρμονία【巡音ルカ・初音ミク】[Processing Minim Video] from 4Y4 on Vimeo.

I love the delicate, incredibly sensitive motion of the little ‘line spider’ that reacts almost magnetically to the position of other lines – the process of drawing the lines becomes faster and faster the more lines there are already – the spider grows more ‘legs’ to make the connections – the seemingly erratic yet controlled movement is mesmerizing and the path left behind looks like delicately spun silk with a beautifully controlled yet free pattern. There is a cultivated randomness with beautiful visual rhythm that seems to reflect the music of the video.

The color’s are controlled by what areas the spider is magnetically drawn to. I love it. Code wise…..man – that’s tough. Perlin noise used to determine how far the moving spider point needs to be from another existing vertex to connect – if the vertex is close enough at a certain point in time according to a noise funciton – a line is made and the creation of that line contributes to the vector that determines the spider’s direction? It’s definitely more complicated. But it was hard to find more about this piece in a language I understand. (as in…..english)

That being said, here’s another piece that I absolutely loved by Chris Riebschlager – http://the816.com/

To play with his program in the browser:

http://fun.the816.com/neobrush/

 

One of my all time favorite artists ever is american impressionist John Singer Sargent. His effortlessly beautiful brush work is to DIIIIIIEEEE for. I love it – there’s a suggestion of movement and form that leaves the mind’s eye filling in the gaps as the eye is drawn across the piece endlessly. I feel some of that in Chris’s brush work above.

The rest of his aesthetic does tend toward computational generated textured brush like strokes/patterns and movement. Another of his projects was a program that took user inputted strokes and made them look like monet’s multicolored paint clumps. An instant ‘paint like monet’ moment.

How’d he do it? I’m guessing he ran an existing image through the program which picked up random select colors from where the brush is, and then with some measure of controlled randomness (gaussian?) created colors for the indibidual swirling lines that are bezier controlled by values based on the mouse direction/speed.