Polar Grid

Polar Grid is part of the fxhash live minting experience at Proof of People, London 2022.

This is a study of color, motion, and composition, and an homage to cinema as an artform. Colorful shapes overlap and pulse in a ever repeating dance. An abstracted movie experience. Each color palette in the series (except one) is inspired by a different film director (if you want a real challenge, see how many you can guess without looking at the feature names).

The palettes were extracted from movie stills or movie posters and fine tuned by hand. As often, I have to thank independent tool makers for their indirect help. My gratitude goes to David Aerne for FarbVélo and Fabrizio Bianchi for Coolors.

The code for Polar Grid is based on early iterations of what ultimately became my carat series. Both projects come from the same fascination for color as a system, even though I used a different approach here. You could call this a carat prequel.

The animation is done using a technique called polar noise. This makes it so the motion of all elements ends up repeating in the same amount of time. This is useful for generating motion that loops perfectly while still appearing organic. In this particular case, the animation repeats every π × 100 seconds.

A challenge in building any generative system is to find the right balance between coherence and variety. I designed the system with the large edition size in mind. During development I generated hundreds of iterations and tweaked my code to make sure that every iteration is truly unique and fits the overall aesthetic of the collection.

I truly hope you will enjoy your own little abstract movie.

— Raphaël de Courville

Released: July 6th 2022

Medium: p5.js, html canvas, css

Reference: sk220621

About the artist

Raphaël de Courville is a generative artist, streamer, and educator. His artistic work is an exploration of generative systems, patterns, interactivity, and time. Born in Paris, he lives and works in Berlin.

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