LO: Randomness

This project, by Tyler Hobbs, is a generative piece that uses a custom algorithm to generate this distinct visual “painting.” I admire it firstly because it’s simply beautiful and mesmerizing to look at. Also, the artists’ website says that he strives to create work that strikes a balance between “the cold, hard structures that computers excel at, and the messy, organizing chaos we observe in the natural world around us.” Likewise, this piece in particular is obviously a digital artwork, but also looks strikingly like waves of an ocean or like some organic surface with hills, valleys, shadows, twists and turns– making it neither completely inorganic or organic, neither completely machine nor natural. I wasn’t able to find much information on the exact random algorithms, but with the specification of the piece having 16 iterations, it seems that the algorithm makes this “Blue Literal” image randomly, just with the bounds and specifications of Hobbs’ code, so that every time, it creates this image of these small, short lines of different shades of blue traveling in different but slowly changing directions, with the shades of blue also changing in relation to the lines around it, creating this gradient/wave effect. Again, the specificity of the aesthetic with the combination of a random generation makes it both distinctly computer-generated and simultaneously distinctly Hobbs’ art.