This summer, EditArt is hosting the series ‘Generative Playground’, featuring a whole host of amazing artists, firmly and proudly ensconced within the Tezos blockchain. My own piece is titled Between Impact and Echo, featuring the crazed journey of excitable light rays, and I'm delighted to be joining a whole host of admirable artists, both old and new.
Between Impact and Echo is the ninth piece in the series… GP09.
I took the word playground as my starting point—the generative aspect goes without saying! I'm a little old for playgrounds, alas: I love a roundabout, but getting off is fraught with dizziness; worse, I find my hips no longer comfortably fit within the confines of the slide, leading to less-than-optimal velocity.
No, my kind of playground is the sweeping, glitter-strewn expanse of the dance floor, with laser light bouncing from the glitterball, and the DJ spinning what I'm assured by my tea-drinking companions over shortbread, are still known as 'phat tunes'.
And so, it begins. This is no ordinary line. It has a starting point, it has segments, and it has complicated mathematics that allows me to calculate its entire length, and the position of any point along the whole, multi-segment line. I say complicated mathematics; I'm clearly making out it's harder than it is.
Anyway, this is the starting point. At the moment, those inflexion points are hard-coded, but that's the next step. Reflection.
A ltitle more interesting. I take all the previous work and refactor it into a nice, neat Javascript class. I pour several of them into an array, and add a little bit of debugging code so I can see where the lines begin, end, and bounce. They're still hard-coded bounces, but I can easily sort out the reflections in time. Vectors are my playground, even if I didn't listen very hard to Mr. Lawrence way back in high school. (A note for Professor Wallace, Leeds University: I listened a little more to you, as the degree seemed somewhat higher stakes, but I was still secretly more interested in fractals.)
Anyway, this isn't quite what I wanted, not just yet. I'll get there, but this is one of many failed attempts to get an effect I liked. Notice after each inflexion point there are a couple of extra lines. I thought it'd be nice if the lines split apart like raindrops hitting a surface, throwing out a couple of extra lines to either side of the main beam. Sounded good… looked awful.
Rallying round for another attempt, and mindful of the blue-laser light that swept the nightclubs of Scarborough in the late 90s (thank you Shuji Nakamura!), I decided a palette change, and a burst of blue light might work. It looks good: I might keep it.
However, it's time to tackle the reflection itself, to throw some circles into the mix and some straight-line barriers.
So, we have objects in the way of the rays, and we have rays that bounce off objects. What we don't have are the sparkly points when lines hit objects, nor the fading across the length of lines. This is because at the moment the lines just spill out from a central point with no idea of how far they're going to go; they just get to bounce a specific number of times.
What they need to do is have 'energy', and for that to diminish over distance, which means I need to tweak how the lines class and the obstacles class interact with each other. In fact, the lines class needs to behave a little more like a particle system than straight-forward lines.
Lines begin from a central point with a specific amount of energy
They bounce around a mixture of line-based and circle-based obstacles
Energy is expended over time, and lines fade over the course of their lifespan
Beauty unexpectedly emerges from this chaotic mess of code
So, we have lines that originate in a circle, some distance from the centre of the canvas. They should probably begin pointing inwards towards the centre, or possibly I could make the starting distance range from -0.5 * root(2) to 0.5 * root(2), for esoteric and mathematical reasons. At some point I need to start whittling down parameters into sliders, and that one seems like a fairly obvious thing to make variable, and with a very obvious visual effect.
