Origins: haywire

A crusty piece of code I still like after all these time: hay­wire. If I remem­ber cor­rectly, this is a prime exam­ple of a cod­ing acci­dent. Orig­i­nally a 2D exper­i­ment in trac­ing curves, it got an unex­pected sense of depth when I mistyped the translate used in the par­ti­cle draw­ing rou­tine. To me it looks like the after­math of an extremely com­pli­cated clock going cuckoo.

Although not read­ily appar­ent from the code, this piece is a pre­cur­sor of cur­va­ture. Both con­structs keep track of drawn curves by fill­ing an invis­i­ble grid. When the trac­ing par­ti­cles hit an already filled space, the curve is stopped and rein­car­nated. This mech­a­nism is obfus­cated in hay­wire by the arti­fi­cial depth off­set. But if all curves would be drawn on the same plane, the result­ing image would resem­ble those gen­er­ated by curvature.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 11th, 2009 at 00:36 and is filed under Blog, Portfolio, Processing and tagged with construct, curvature, particles, Processing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.