cyclic: outwitted by a 1000 particles

I have to admit, I’m hope­lessly fumble-fingered in vec­tor draw­ing. I never get the curves right, some­how they’re not smooth, not nat­ural looking.

The funny thing is that a 1000 par­ti­cles chas­ing each other from ran­dom start­ing posi­tions seem to man­age this quite nicely. Ini­tial jagged chaos swiftly evolves into flow­ing curves, con­tin­u­ously try­ing to sim­plify them­selves. Guess I’m not a suf­fi­ciently com­plex, self-interacting system.

Any­way I’m rather pleased with this con­struct. Point­less overkill makes me happy. The con­struct and its code can be found here. There’s no inter­ac­tion beyond reset­ting with a click of the mouse.

Update: Lucas Tamarit pointed out, some­what uh… point­edly, that this piece is very sim­i­lar to ‘sand­trav­eller’ by Jared Tar­bell. Check this and the rest of his work out here. I’ve got to agree there’s def­i­nitely a resem­blance. How­ever, I’ve checked out the code and the mechan­ics behind ‘cyclic’ are really dif­fer­ent from ‘sand­trav­eller’, as is the ren­der­ing tech­nique. I invite every­body else to make the comparison.

Not every paint­ing of a sun­flower is a Van Gogh forgery.

cyclic

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This entry was posted on Saturday, June 21st, 2008 at 22:56 and is filed under Blog, General, Portfolio, Processing and tagged with , , , . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

4 Responses to “cyclic: outwitted by a 1000 particles”

  1. Lucas Tamarit says:
    July 1, 2008 at 18:05

    Let’s say that you didn’t know the orig­i­nal work by Jared Tar­bell, and that this is the rea­son why you didn’t even men­tion his name.

    http://www.complexification.net/gallery/machines/sandTraveler/index.php

  2. frederik says:
    July 1, 2008 at 21:42

    Yipes, the word­ing is way too close for com­fort. Even the num­ber of par­ti­cles is iden­ti­cal… and they chase each other.
    Any­way, I’m pretty famil­iar with the work of Jared Tar­bell, complexification.net is on my list of links. And let’s not for­get I refer to his work in my post of june 30th: cur­va­ture. Com­plex­i­fi­ca­tion was one of my first expo­sures to Pro­cess­ing, way over in 2004, it left me in awe.
    Iron­i­cally, I remem­ber think­ing when I put up the piece that the color palette is very sim­i­lar to ‘Sub­strate’ and other works of his.
    Now that you pointed this out, I look at his code. The actual con­cept is dif­fer­ent, and beyond the first glance, so is the result.
    All I have are a thou­sand steer­ing par­ti­cles in a chain each try­ing to reach the next one. This causes an ini­tial tan­gled mess to smoothen out. the inter­ac­tions in Jared’s piece are more com­plex, more phys­i­cal and essen­tially far more inter­est­ing. Check out his code, it’s an education!

  3. Lucas Tamarit says:
    July 2, 2008 at 13:26

    Well, I think that invit­ing peo­ple to check out Tarbell’s work is the best thing to do.
    I won’t argue any further.

  4. Jared Tarbell says:
    October 8, 2008 at 07:22

    I am hum­bled by any com­par­isons being made between my work Sand.Traveller and Frederik’s algo­rithm. There are sim­i­lar­i­ties, but the basic idea behind Sand.Traveller was so sim­ple, I can hardly lay claim to any orig­i­nal­ity. Also, I think we all have to agree 1000 is just a plain great number.

    As for the color palette, I should admit that most all my palettes are ‘bor­rowed’ from painters like Jack­son Pollock.

    It’s won­der­ful to find this dis­course, as I have been lost in Wblut for the bet­ter part of two hours tonight (begin­ning with your recent imple­men­ta­tion of Voronoi frac­tals — wow!). I am totally amazed at the breadth and com­plex­ity of these works and hon­ored to even be men­tioned. Thank you kindly!

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