Harmonium #17

I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
Wallace Stevens

Harmonium began as an algorithmic exploration of space filling and curve placement, and grew into a study of the many ways that forms can coexist in a space.

There are three stages to the rendering process:

1. Initial drawing with a placeholder color assignment algorithm
2. Analysis and final color assignment
3. Streamline tapering and conversion to SVG

The final step will typically cause the image to look darker than the previous steps due to the tapering of the streamlines and the vector nature of SVG. I recommend viewing Harmonium outputs on the largest screen you have available.

The final SVG version of the image can be exported by pressing the 'e' key.

Plotting

You can disable/enable streamline tapering by pressing the 't' key. Un-tapered exports are intended for plotting on your favorite pen plotter, and include several Inkscape-compatible layer definitions to make plotting different colors possible. (Be sure to disable the background layer.)

The SVG has no dimensions defined so you will need to set the paper dimensions by adjusting the SVG as needed. I will provide additional detail on how to do this in an upcoming blog post. (The short version is to change the page dimensions in Inkscape and set the viewbox width and height to 1.0.)

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@jeffpalmer