Claire Lee – Looking Outwards – 06

I decided to write about Yale architecture student Aaron Tobey’s Randomness Project. It seems to have been for a coding-based architecture course, and essentially runs a program that draws a randomly-generated set of lines and shapes on 36 canvases. I found it really interesting because each of the 36 canvases were in the same format (same background and same color/weight of line) but seemed like they were generated with different programs. I admired that despite these variations, the entire piece is cohesive and comes together in an aesthetically pleasing way.

Trying to think around the algorithms that might have created this piece was really interesting because unlike some of the previous works I’ve found, this was a student’s work. I still think that it goes a little beyond the scope of what I’ve learned to do so far, but the script used to create this visual piece uses a set of rules to overlap circles, triangles, and lines in a random but constrained space, with a defined frame per second rate. It starts out with a “base” piece–a set of randomly generated canvases containing shapes that don’t change– and then layers dynamic shapes on top of that. I’m not sure whether these bases are hard-coded (for aesthetic purposes?) or not, but they seem fairly random.