Mechanical Attractors

About

What fascinates me most about generative art is how simple processes are able to produce complex, surprising and attractive outputs. In most cases the processes involved are abstract and hard for the general public to understand. The mathematical equations in the attractors, the rules of the cellular automata or the recursive algorithms that produce some fractals are far from intuitive. Even though they are beautifully simple and powerful they might not evoke the experience of the generative art process for most people.

In this work I have tried to make use of processes that are intuitive to most people and still capable of producing interesting and surprising results. I have restricted the experiments to mechanical artifacts involving simple physical interactions that are concrete, predictable and easy to understand for everyone. The output of the experiments consists simply in drawing the paths of some of the objects in the scene.

Experience

By clicking on one of the images a scene will start. Observe the result as the process evolves. This is simply the traces of some objects in the scene. At any moment you may press the space bar to toggle between the views that reveal the process responsible for generating this result. You may also press the 'c' key to clear the resulting image.

The scenes are also interactive. Turquoise objects can be controlled using the mouse, and this will directly affect the resulting image. The small red objects whose paths get drawn can also be grabbed making the process even more understandable.

Details

This project has been created using the Fisica library for Processing.

For any feedback contact me at: email at ricardmarxer dot com