But most of all, they dreamt sight.

It began with a pattern: a knotting and weaving of countless strands, dyed in a hundred colours, carrying a charge of energy which so dazzled the sleepers they had to shield their minds’ eyes.

And then, as if the pattern was becoming too ambitious to hold its present order, the knots began to slide and slip. The colours at each intersection bled into the air, until the vision was obscured in a soup of pigments through which the loosed strands described their liberty in line and comma and dot, like the brushstrokes of some master calligrapher. At first the marks seemed quite arbitrary — but as each trace drew colour to itself, and another stroke was laid upon it, and another upon that, it became apparent that forms were steadily emerging from the chaos.

Weaveworld, Clive Barker

Click here to view the embedded slideshow.

Every now and then, you stumble on the work of someone so talented it hurts. I already alluded to the ambivalent nature of admiration in the previous post concerning the work of Robert Hodgin. On the one hand, it’s a joy to see such talent. On the other hand, you can’t but feel pain at your own inadequacies when confronted with a truly original, beautifully constructed piece of code.

Jonathan McCabe and his art falls firmly in this category. The depth of his pieces betrays an admirable grasp of biological patterns and artificial evolution. If there ever were scientists of art, Jonathan would be at the pinnacle.

Through his images on Flickr I got my first introduction to Turing patterns. I leave it up to you to discover exactly what these are. It’s not the destination that matters, it’s the journey (significant pause). An entire new vista of complexity has opened up for me and if I, or you, can ever produce a piece that reveals a fraction of the inherent beauty, it will be time well spent.

I’ll definitely work on code exploring this new territory. I only hope that I can find an approach sufficiently different to warrant public exposure. In the meantime, please explore Jonathan’s work and the fascinating foundation it builds on.

The code itself is finished. But I want to get a documented version online with a decent GUI and that’s taking some effort. Also, it won’t be the fastest code, I feel that speed optimization at this point would make the code too dense to be of use to anyone. Anyway, it would probably be too costly memory-wise for an online applet.

You know, it can be really hard to focus when people are consistently making amazing things, people like Dave Bollinger (again), Allesandro Fiore and Hilde&Gwen (Simon’s a bit young ).

I want to drop everything and start playing around with tracing particles again. Arggh, must finish this first, must finish this … pretty, pretty particles…