Joseph Zhang – Looking Outwards – 01

As I browsed projects online, I couldn’t help but stop and admire Murasaki Uma’s Impressionist Blobs – Starry Night. Murasaki Uma is a freelance artist based in Japan who specializes in Computational Design. This digital installation is an individual project by Uma that showcases flowing particles made up of Vincent van Gogh’s Starry Night. When in motion the visuals flow in an organic fashion that mimics the wind patterns in Starry Night. As seen when clicking the link, Impressionist Blobs is built with HTML, CSS, and Javascript.

Uma implements a “Start” and “Restart” functionality that allows the viewer some control over the animation. Clicking anywhere on the interface shifts the camera perspective to an arbitrary angle. If I were to iterate on Uma’s project, I would offer more control to the user with the ability to fully control camera shifts and movement.

Despite scouring the web, I failed to find any biographies or summaries about his background. However, I did find the few sites he is active on: Github, Twitter, CodePen, and his personal site. Impressionist Blobs really reflects his other pieces of work, that is, its sense of unity and order whole that holds together chaotically random pieces. This project really points to the future of visual design, that is creating generated graphics through coded algorithms.