Observations of Molnar's Artwork
- The artwork is square, composed of a virtual grid of n^2 cells.
- From a cursory glance, n looks to be roughly 50.
- The artwork consists of many short black lines, each occupying a virtual square cell in the grid.
- Each line has the same length.
- There is a natural disposition to each of the lines; i.e. many of the lines are oriented in the same direction, with outliers turning a random angle from this reference angle.
- These "default" directions are cardinal; i.e. they are horizontal or vertical.
- The background is white.
- Random blotches of lines are absent.
- There are several of these blotches, each of varying sizes and shapes.
- The lines are just long enough to barely intersect their adjacent neighbors.
My process was this: Create a grid which is n x n. Each element in this grid represents a line. Each element in the grid contains two values: both are based on noise(), the first determines the line's angle, the second determines whether or not the line will appear. In an imbedded for-loop, draw each of these lines if their second value permits. Toggle noise variables to get desirable blotch frequency and line angles.
It was fairly difficult experimenting with the noise variables to get a desirable appearance which emulated Molnar's work. Unfortunately, I think my piece has a lot of homogenously-sized blotches, whereas the blotches in Molnar's works vary a lot. I think if I were to reattempt this project, I would instead of having a noise-based value which determined whether or not the line would be drawn by binarily comparing it to another cut-off value, I would make the probability of the line being drawn dependent on the noise-based value. I better appreciate the sophistication of Molnar's work, especially considering that I was able to use built-in functions on my laptop, which is much more accessible and efficient than the proto-computers and printers of Molnar's time.
Link to Project: https://editor.p5js.org/rsunadaw/sketches/3EHxkDIf9
