Looking Outward-02

Goerge Michael Brower – Staggering Beauty

Regarding this project, I really admire its comedic nature as the rapid moving of the worm causes a spastic response with tiled images of explosions flashing very colorfully. It completely violates all contextual expectations of the silly-looking worm and the majestic-sounding website/project name. The worm seamlessly follows where your mouse goes, and there’s a threshold of moving it around enough that it will start generating an absurd amount of colors and images that flash really fast at the user. I actually decided to do this because I was looking at Leander Herzog’s work first, and it really reminded me of this nostalgic viral phenom that is the Staggering Beauty.
I mean, the code for this algorithm can probably be figured out or reverse-engineered pretty easily in theory. Since it is known as a javascript demo, I can definitely conceive of it in p5.js. The shape of the worm flowing is probably the most difficult part, but generally moving with your mouse is using the mouseX and mouseY variables with whatever makes up the shape of the worm. It also hits the walls, so there are bounds involved. Lastly, I don’t know how specifically the algorithm measures the speed at which the user is moving their mouse, but a certain surpassing of a set threshold with an if statement allows for all the flashing colors and images to appear rapidly according to your mouse speed after breaking that threshold.

The artist’s sensibilities just really come alive in this piece by how animated this little guy is. The worm is so minimalistic, but it plays into its weirdly cute and nonchalant nature as its eyes blink intermittently as well. The fact that you can see the dynamic animation of its eyes getting bigger and an “x-ray” look of its simplistic organs as if the worm is getting shocked in the cartoons is really just great, memorable, and deservingly viral.

http://www.staggeringbeauty.com/