Week 2 – Shahram – The Interruption

One part of the video that really caught my attention was the phrase “natural unreasonable order.” It made me think that the more humans chase perfection and efficiency, the more our way of living starts becoming unsustainable. We often wonder how people managed without all the technology and advancements we have today, but the truth is life on earth has always sustained itself regardless of technology.

In my piece, I wanted to capture the balance by mixing randomness and structure. The randomness in how the grid gets colored helps keep the viewer’s attention, while my choice of squares over circles represents order versus chaos. Squares feel more rigid and structured, while circles feel looser and more chaotic. It takes a few seconds for the grid to gradually fill with color, almost like watching the slow formation of nature itself.

But here’s the twist: as long as you let the process run undisturbed, the artwork stays vibrant. The moment you interfere by clicking, the cells start turning white. If you keep interfering, the whole grid could eventually end up blank – an analogy to what happens when humanity disrupts nature’s delicate, chaotic order: color fades, and life disappears. I was debating whether or not to have a reset option, but ended up not having it, because life never gives us the chance to go back and fix our mistakes anyways. 

There’s also another layer to this idea. We usually celebrate curiosity, but there’s a point where too much curiosity can lead to destruction. Curiosity kills the cat, right?

Here’s the Interruption:

 

I like this code because it’s kind of the main part but it uses nested for loops to create a grid, where each cell has a random chance of being filled with a random color, unless it has been disabled by a click :

function draw() {
  for (let c = 0; c < cols; c++) {
    for (let r = 0; r < rows; r++) {
      if (!disabled[c][r] && random() > p) {
        fill(random(palette));
        rect(c * cell, r * cell, cell, cell);
      }
    }
  }
}

For improvements and future work, I would like to add a slow fade effect so that when a cell is clicked, instead of instantly going white, it gradually fades away, almost like nature decaying over time. It might also be interesting to add sound to the clicks, so that human interference is not only seen visually (through the white cells) but also felt in other ways.