Creature Transformations

Creature Transformations is the application of the algorithm of a previous work published here on fxhash called TransformationStudy23. For this generative artwork, I reconstructed the same database from sketches I saved for almost 50 years. A database of the digitized coordinates for four outlined figures (a frog, a cat, an elephant, and a frog) which I used in several plotter art works. These representational figures were contrived; in the sense that they all were all designed to be drawn as a continuous line, digitized in the same direction, and they had the same number of points. This made it relatively simple for me to manipulate them as I learned to program and formulate simple algorithms.

Please refer to the description for TransformationStudy23 for more background.

By superimposing two creatures, one over the other, an interesting visual transformation can be made. Line segments of one image are randomly removed based on a percentage which it is drawn over another image whose line segments are added randomly with the inverse percentage. Over a series of frames, it appears that one image changes into the other. To make things a bit more visually interesting I randomly rotate the images in each frame.

Figure one (upper left corner) is a randomly selected creature that I transform to a second creature (lower right corner) over 81 frames. (The sequence represented here as 9 stacked rows of 9).

I choose to not add color and keep the image as true to being drawn on a plotter as was the case back in the 1970's. Black pen on a white background.

I hope you enjoy my retrospective recreation of both the algorithm and its application to the creature menagerie.

Please visit: www.drbillkolomyjec.com