This week I’ve begun to actually play around with the code and work through a couple different experiments of getting it to develop the kind of shapes I wanted; it’s definitely posing a different way of thinking, the math likes to develop very rigid forms with very precise borders and locations!
It’s making me reflect on my relationship to this project and how in my trying to brute force a tiny code to draw like a human, I am instructing it to perform for me and it is working exactly as I tell it to. I’m thinking of sort of breaking this idea and having the computer make its own decisions is going to work in my favour (I guess it still is doing exactly as I say though, as I instruct it to have agency!)
This is when I came across this particular Coding Train video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TaluaAD9MKA&t=3s) and I had gotten very interested in the interaction between having a viewer or performer directly affect the visual output of the code while the computer makes its own set of unique decisions, creating a completely different visual composition each time the program runs with or without a person interacting with it.
It’s a little ironic, as I was playing with this code I realized that the solution to the coding problem Dan was presenting in the video (having a code run with trails while simultaneously run one without) was exactly what I needed to undo to have the code start making the types of forms I wanted it to. Goodbye clear canvas! Now seeing the trails the computer was “drawing itself”, I was happy to see the interesting forms it made randomly on its own.
Que 2 hours of hair-pulling trying to get fullscreening to work, had to look at my prof’s code and write the rest of my code around it to get it to work. I had tried inserting it exactly into my code with no success, but somehow writing my code around the fullscreen code did? Computers man.
This was then just a game of messing with the numbers until I had something that was starting to look like what I wanted. I had thought about working with individual pixels to create my forms, but found that on a large scale like this, generating the shapes themselves was working quite well.
So now I’v got a good foundation for my program. Each time I run it, it creates it’s own unique form and the user is able to draw alongside it!
I’m thinking a lot about how the mood of this piece is pretty quiet, personal, and introspective. This should help me inform the next main phase of the project: the audio!