Wings

Alexander Calder once said, “Well, the archaeologist will tell you there's a little bit of Miró in Calder and a little bit of Calder in Miró.” I feel there is a little of both Miró and Calder in these fanciful pieces. I have called the project, Wings, because I feel get it off the ground. The breakthrough came when I suddenly realized that instead of thinking in terms of lines, I needed to think a sense of flight as I look at them. And flight was the sensation I felt when the pieces of the project finally fell into place. While I have done several generative image compositions, this is my first piece of art to be fully algorithmic, and I struggled to in terms of parabolas.

The background color for each piece is randomly chosen, while the shapes are always black and the lines always white. As I developed the code, I experimented with several different approaches to color, but I kept coming back to this simple palette. It seemed to me to emphasize motion without distraction.

The drawing grid is divided randomly into 10 to 100 divisions. Each crosshair on the grid becomes a starting point for a mark, with these starting points chosen randomly as the code repeats a number of drawing loops. With these four random inputs - grid division, color, coordinate, and number of loops - the unique possibilities number in the hundreds of millions. A few are offered for your enjoyment here.

I’d like to give a shout out to those who helped me in my fx(hash) learning curve. Thank you josemiguel.tez and Elout de Kok. I also leaned heavily and with gratitude on Rune Madson’s, Programming Design Systems (https://programmingdesignsystems.com), and on the supportive folks in the community Discord.

Created by Wanda Oliver (wandaoliver.tez) in Sept., 2022.
This work is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.

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