I was struck recently by this sequence of images by Robert Hodgin titled “Making a Sun the hard Way”. It is a set of images to accompany a talk that he gave at UCLA on his work using the processing programming language. Unfortunately, there is no summary of the talk up online yet, but these appear to show a realtime simulation of the formation of a sun.
“Made with Processing and runs in near realtime (anywhere from 5 to 30 fps). The sphere surface is not traditionally texture mapped and is made up of a couple hundred freely moving overlapping textures. The entire system is dynamic, and with a zippy computer, could probably be audio responsive with little extra overhead.”
A quick wander through the rest of his site reveals a number of mesmerising landscapes of fluid, coded beauty. Like this video created for a DVD named ‘Advanced Beauty’.
Or the “chaotic hairballs” of the Magnetic Ink series in which ink trails are traced onto a ‘paper’ surface and every now and then the whole geometry is dropped onto the surface in a vision of exploding stellar worlds.
Roberts blog and flickr page hold many many more such explorations.
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