“One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.” — Friedrich Nietzsche

Concept:

For this assignment, I decided to go for a feel about how I view life. In my opinion, I view life as quite chaotic and we feel like we don’t have really any control over it. But at some point, we stand back and stop for a moment to get our life in order. We do this from scheduling, persistency in our work and even making sure that nothing will surprise us. But no matter how much we try, there will always be even a little bit of chaos in order. Which is why the piece below represents that very feeling.

How it’s made:

This actually partially uses some code from my last assignment, namely the random ellipses going around in different directions. It uses a simple for loop, that constantly iterates a random color for the ellipses and they are placed randomly on the canvas. I’ve made it so they are smaller as if I made them bigger they would be more dense and you practically can’t see much.

That in itself is meant to represent chaos. There’s no specific order or movement that the ellipses follow, no specific size they must have and no specific color they need to embody. To me, this represents pure chaos.

But I then wanted to represent the logic and order our lives embody so I thought the best to do that, was to get the ellipses under control. I was thinking about what’s the best way to represent order and I thought:

“To make order from chaos, there needs to be a base line structure to follow.”

Wait, a line? Yeah that could work. But to actually showcase more ellipses I needed to make a 2×2 made only from ellipses. So I tapped in to some coding knowledge from before and made a nested for loop.

A highlighted bit of code I’m proud of:

I really like the nested for loop that I made to represent order. It takes in the length and width of the canvas, and sorts out the ellipses in rows and columns. It’s quite simple honestly when you think about it. Also I made sure to move them a bit down so they don’t stick to the walls of the canvas.

if (pause == true){
    background(255)
    for (let i = 0; i < widthCanvas; i = i + 50){
      for (let n = 0; n < heightCanvas; n = n + 50){
        fill(random(255), random(255), random(255), random(255));
        ellipse(i + 25, n + 25, random(50));
      }
    }
  }

But I thought more in adding a bit more to this. Of course, order can be easily represented with rows of ellipses in the same color. But I feel as though, no matter how much order exists, there’s still a little element of chaos inside.

Which is why, I made it so the ellipses have different color, and different sizes, but still in line with the order created. To me, it represents just that still a little bit of chaos can exist.

Reflection:

I enjoyed making this simple effect. Originally I wanted to be ambitious and go for an effect where if I click the mouse at a certain point in the canvas, then all of the circles would come towards the mouse. And when the user would let go, they would go back to the random movements. Unfortunately I struggled and couldn’t think of a way to go about it.

But that’s not to say that this wasn’t good. I think giving it more time to thinker and play around, perhaps someday I could make it have cool animations and effects.