Choices

This week's assignment was all about making choices. My idea started off simple: Let people draw with their mouse, but then manipulate their drawing. I wanted to sort of create unpredictable yet interesting behaviors that start off of the user's drawing but then take a life of their own.

So I started researching how to go about it. First it was just about drawing points continuously, then moved onto lines, realized that's the mistake I did last time and so found out how to make it curved. With each step forward I suddenly had new things I wanted to improve, or try, or add. I ended up learning how to work with two-dimensional arrays, polylines, the noise() function, and blending modes — which are pretty straight forward but feel like actual magic!

Really enjoyed working on this. I've spent hours tweaking numbers and playing around with all the different variables and scales. So much that it kind of became a meta-assignment for me as I've found it pretty hard to choose which one to show in class.

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I think this might be my favorite one (click inside to draw!)

I just feel like there's some sort of emergent behavior that's quite interesting — if you press the mouse quickly and without dragging it it only makes circles and no lines, but if you do move it you get lines, and then there's this interplay between the two, almost as if it were tiny microbes under a microscope. It looks like there are some points that kind of "trap" some of the other objects — usually between two intersecting lines with a circle right on top. I wonder what causes that to happen, and how to use that to get even more interesting results...

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Anyway, here are some outtakes from different stages of the project:

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Thank you for reading!