I’ve been using vim full time for about 5 years now, and was semi-comfortable with it for a while before that. It’s one of those technologies that you can go really deep on. And once you get used to the vim way of doing things, it’s hard to do things any other way.
In a recent post I shared some thoughts about art and included a few, somewhat tongue-in-cheek comments about the use of random number generation. Specifically,
Random is evil. Random is lazy. Random is OK when you’re starting a new piece. It’s OK when you have a formula and you’re searching for an interesting range of input parameters. But once you find something interesting, lock in those parameters and start focusing.
Circle inversion is a mathematical technique that holds a lot of opportunities for the creative coder.
Circle inversion, or circular inversion, or geometric inversion is a method of transforming a point within a circle to a new point outside the circle or vice-versa. By transforming multiple points, you can transform entire shapes, which become warped and curved in interesting ways, as if the original shape was reflected onto a curved surface. You can even do a circle inversion chaos game with multiple random circles to create interesting fractals. We’ll dive into that after we cover the basics.
I don’t always to a year in review post, but I like to do them when I remember to do so. Looking back over 2021, I’m surprised by how much I did and how much I posted here. Things really got quiet during the last few months, so I forgot how much stuff I cranked out earlier.
Some highlights:
75 blog posts this year! Whoa. Most in a LONG time. And more views on this blog than in well over ten years (thanks HackerNews!)
I did a fair number of tutorials on math, graphics and creative coding techniques.
I finally created a solid version of MinimalComps for the web! Renamed Minicomps (https://minicomps.org/).
I did a bunch of general visual, interactive experiments, even some interactive audio generation stuff.
I participated in 7 days of code in July.
I created an animated gif every day in August for #awegif2021
I bought a Mac. And liked it. But Linux is still my personal daily driver.
I did a deep dive into gif and video making tools, several posts worth of tips and tricks.
I started a mailing list.
I celebrated 20 years of BIT-101!
Sometimes I get a bit down on myself, thinking I’m not doing anything interesting. But when I list it all out, it looks pretty impressive. There was quite a bit going on in my personal and work life the last few months, so things toned down recently. Nothing particularly bad, just stuff pulling my attention away and leaving me with not much energy for writing either code or much else at the end of the day.
I’ve been thinking a lot about “art” recently. Specifically, what people call “generative art”, “algorithmic art”, “code art”, “math art”, etc. Here are some random thoughts.
Message
I’ve never been one to try to communicate some message through the things I create. I really only try to create things that are visually interesting. I can get very excited about the way a piece looks and I just want to show others and hope that they get a taste of that excitement too. Sometimes things I create can evoke various emotions – they can look ominous, dark, scary, energetic, fun, etc. I often find that when I feel a certain way about a piece, others tend to experience that same feeling. I guess you could call that a message if you want. But I don’t know that I’ve ever sat down to create some digital art with the thought, “I feel like creating something dark and ominous today,” or intentionally tried to create any emotion before I started.
I have a good size, custom curated, very well organized library of music on my hard drive. It’s taken me years to create, it’s all backed up. I have a subsonic server behind Wireguard so I can listen to it from my phone or other devices, and it’s all also synced to my Sony Walkman NW-A55 hi-res digital audio player that I use with my Ikko OH1 IEMs.
One of my tricks when coming up with new generative ideas is to take two (or three) completely unrelated techniques and combine them. I even created an app once where I had a long list of concepts and it would randomly combine them and come up with things like, “circle packing with diffuse limited aggregation”. (I just made that up and I’m not sure how it would work, but it’s intriguing, isn’t it?) I can’t say that the app ever sparked any projects that I ended up using, but I’ll probably go back to it some time and see if I can make it better.
This post was one of those successful combinations that evolved on its own and produced something that I have never seen anyone explore before. It produces a visualization of the forces behind a strange attractor that I find fascinating and beautiful. It feels like putting on special glasses that let you see the invisible workings of the universe.
In my last post I talked about my newest eInk tablets from Onyx Boox. Beyond reading ebooks and saving articles, the Note Air is a fantastic sketching tool. The Wacom layer and stylus is one of the big features that led me to look beyond Kindle devices. It was nice on the 7.8″ Nova Pro, but on the 10.3″ Note Air, I’ve really fallen in love with the drawing feature.
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