Artist Patrick Gunderson creates spectacular canvases of particle-generated paintings, a bit like code action paintings. (Action as in the likes of Jackson Pollack, not just ActionScript.) Above, an image from the Create Digital Motion Flickr pool. It’s worth having a closer look on Flickr - as with a physical painting, the closer you get, the more detail you see.
This is a Actionscript 3 generated composition. Color samples are taken from a base image then drawn using a psudo-random line drawing algorithm in concert with a particle system.
The technique itself is not exclusive to Mr. Gunderson, though I really love his use of color in the composition. Now, all due respect to ActionScript, I just hope he takes a look at some Processing and OpenGL code, as this could be even more fun set in motion, for doing some things Flash may not be quick enough to do. (As you can tell from the name of the site, we have a certain bias toward things that move ’round these parts.)
Really beautiful work, and further evidence that the aesthetics of code can go in all sorts of directions. Definitely check out the many variations in Patrick’s Flickr set; there’s quite a lot more than can fit here.
Updated: I wrote this post quickly and really should have mentioned the work of Erik Natzke, whose techniques Patrick adapted and who is the major artist in this field. Erik’s stuff really deserves its own post, which I didn’t have time to do justice here, so — will remedy that by tomorrow.
