My Last Post

So this is it. We had our art fair today to show off our final projects. I must say, the class did a pretty awesome job. Everyone had a unique idea that resulted in some very interesting art. Today also marked the last day of our computational art class. In three weeks, I was able to learn about NetLogo and use it to create a range of cool computational art pieces, not just admire them.

My two favorite things learned in class were most likely particle systems and recursions. I found particle systems cool because I liked that a large number of seemingly unrelated objects could move and come together to make something. Recursions were interesting because I saw the resemblance to nature through leaves and branches.

Below is my final project, a video titled Sky Garden. It utilizes recursions, among other things and depicts a garden of flowers and vines growing in the sky. As the flowers grow, a butterfly comes along and slowly kills off each flower it lands on, but the flowers grow back too quickly to be eliminated. I thought this was a cool twist on what actually happens in nature.

The flowers and vines were both created by making single entities (called turtles in NetLogo) that moved in a certain direction (dependent on what was being created) while hatching another turtle to form a continuous vine or stem. The petals of the flowers were created similarly except that a recursion was used to form the shape. Finally, the butterfly was rendered by changing the car shape in NetLogo to a butterfly using code found online.

Overall, I was happy with it, though I couldn't have done it without the help of Dr. Stonedahl. It achieves the goal of evoking the serenity of nature while adding the twist provided by the butterfly.

I plan on coming back to generating art computationally - perhaps after I have more programming experience. For now, though, thanks for reading.