Looking Outwards 06: Randomness

The project that I looked at for this week’s LO is “Emergence Algorithms in Processing” by Jesal Mehta in 2018. Even though this is considered more of Mehta’s exploration and design documentation, I still really enjoy seeing how he showed the algorithm slowly building up the piece and the contrast between the start and the end result. The circles in the piece are generated at random points of the canvas with random diameters. New circles are then drawn wherever two circles overlap and with new diameters that allow them to touch the two parent circles. The generation continues on, ultimately creating a full piece and pattern. I find it fascinating to see how a few simple circles can evolve into such a complicated piece. This also relates a lot to what we’ve already learned in class, and it makes me wonder how I could also explore randomness as Mehta did. The only controlled variable is the initial diameters, and the rest simply relies on the code and just pure randomness.