Symmetry? (Assignment 2)

After browsing endlessly through the magazines and articles, I decided I was going to build a piece that resembled the following design by Georg Nees. I thought that using six different items in my work with different patterns would allow me to play arround with the functions we learned in class and further grasp the concept of randomness and noise.

My first order of business was to draw the six circles on screen. Unlike the original piece, I decided it would look better if I prevented them from touching each other. This, because I wanted to use different colors on each. Below are some pictures of the initial code and experimentation. 

As soon as I set up everything I began to play arround with lines. I realized that, in order to build something to resemble the picture I was basing myself on, I would need lines with different lengths, and thus decided to play a little with the shapes I knew. I did this because I wanted my focus to be on for() loops, noise and randomness. Hence, I created three pairs of patterns that would give my art a symmetrical and unique feeling.

The more I worked on the project, the more I made it my own. I changed a lot of components I was not expecting to, and the last few hours of work were spent making sure that all of the elements made sense together and that the piece was aesthetically pleasing. Overall I am very happy with the final product. In the future, I would like to spend some time figuring out how to randomize the beginning and endpoints of the lines to, perhaps, do something more similar to the original piece.

The final product is composed of:

• Circles 1 & 6: for() function creating green lines rotating with a noise value  on opposite directions and different scaling.
• Circle 2: for() function creating circles in a random pattern slowed down by an “if” statement.
• Circle 5: Orange circles varying in size through a noise value.
• Circles 3 & 4: Blue rectangles rotating on opposite directions and with slightly different scaling.

Throughout the process, I lost all my work once because my computer crashed when I used i+3 as opposed to i+=3 when writing a noise function. One of my biggest takeaways is to constantly save the code, and to document the process. Never losing anything again 🙂