Richard Willis

Sitting at the back of Grant Skinner’s session at ‘Flash on the Beach’ a few weeks ago i got my cellular automata classes out and did another visualisation with them. It’s really nice that they’re so easy to use, I can bash something like this out with in just a couple of hours. Again, just click the wee arrow to get going:

OK, not the most astonishing work, it would really be nice to push the envelope a bit further with it. Putting autonomous objects in a controlled environment is obviously going to be a rich vein for software, visualisations, experiments and games for the foreseeable future and I’m currently wondering quite how we can use that stuff in interesting new ways.

Having put the original cellular automata swf up a couple of days ago I found myself in a coding frame of mind, so I decided to devote the whole of yesterday to it. I abstracted the data sections of the previous version out so i could use their mechanisms to produce new generative visualisations and having done that got straight down to making a second. Here it is, just click the wee arrow to get going:

Works well with music, particularly ‘In the Musicals‘ from the soundtrack to ‘Dancer in the Dark‘, somewhat unexpectedly.

This is a great little bit of generative art, probably the best I’ve ever made. It’s based upon ‘cellular automata’. Click the wee arrow to start. Be warned though: it moves at a pretty slow pace and takes a good five minutes to get really good. i like it that way.

For some background as to what cellular automata are and an explanation of what the black & white squares along the bottom signify, read on…

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