Flash Studies
I spent well over a decade creating, coding, and generating art in Flash, and it is still dear to me. It was a vector tool. You drew a shape, not a picture of a shape, and it stayed sharp at any size you asked for. Something about that lodged in me and never came out: everything I make now still comes out as vector.
This is Flash work, all of it ActionScript 3: following code from the books, trying to replicate the great generative artists of the day, or making something inspired by them. Flash is where I learned to start with one small rule and watch what it does, to draw everything from code rather than by hand, and to treat a piece as something that runs rather than something that sits still. Most of how I work now was learned there.
Thank you to Ruffle, the open source Flash Player emulator, for letting ActionScript 3 live on in the browser.
Under every piece are four small squares. i shows what the piece is doing, h holds it still, r starts it again, and s makes a new version (so does the space bar). Every version has a number, shown beside the squares; type one there and press enter to get that version back.
Motion
Things that walk, branch, pack, orbit and follow, each one running live from its own rule.
03 limb tree
Trees that grow and die back. Each branch waits its turn, grows out smoothly, sprouts smaller branches, and later withers from the tips inward. A light crosses the sky and the trees lean toward it. A slow sway runs up through the branches, a little stronger in the twigs than in the trunk.
Pixels and Filters
The sheet painted with the player's own bitmaps, blurs, blend modes and displacement.
39 overprint
Three see-through inks are printed on one sheet of paper, one after another: a red, a grey and a paler grey. Each ink on its own is fairly light. Nothing dark is ever printed. Every dark patch is a place where two or three inks lie on top of each other, the way sheets of coloured cellophane darken where they cross. The three printings never quite line up. Each one keeps slipping by a hair and turning a touch, so thin rims of pure colour show along the edges and keep changing, and the small targets in the corners show exactly how far out each ink is.
Sand Machines
One rule drawn in grains that are never wiped away. Each machine stops itself, and the finished sheet is the picture.
68 four number map
A dot is moved around the page by the same short rule over and over, a rule built out of four numbers, and every place it lands leaves a faint mark. Four hundred and fifty dots do this at once, and because the rule keeps sending them back through the same regions, a shape gathers out of the marks. The sheet holds four of these shapes in a row, and they are all one family: only one of the four numbers is turned between them, by the same amount each time, so you can read straight across the paper what turning that number does. The row is written from left to right over four minutes, a minute to each shape, and the dots are not put back to the start when the machine moves along, so a new shape opens with every dot arriving out of the last one. The small red tip on a shape is the furthest any dot got from the middle of it.
Flat Plates
Flat vector sheets, each drawn whole in one pass, in many versions. The small squares under a plate walk them.
85 circle grid
A block of discs on paper, about eight across and five down, packed so close that they touch. Every cell holds a disc, and everything worth looking at is what sits inside it: some are plain, some carry a ring of another colour around the rim, most hold a smaller disc that can be anything from a speck lost in the middle to one that nearly fills the disc it sits in, and a few go to three levels with a tiny dot at the very centre. A handful of cells are only a ring, with the bare paper showing through. Each version deals itself a fresh set of four to six inks and a fresh character, so one block is nearly all plain discs with three surprises in it and the next is doing something in every cell. The strongest colour of the set is spent two or three times on the whole sheet and always on something small, so it works as a spark rather than a shout.
Try: the small squares under the picture are the versions kept. Press one, or use the left and right arrow keys, to see the next.