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
Three trees grow up from a line of ground, branch by branch, each new twig reaching a little toward a small red sun that crosses the sky. Branches left in the shade wither back from their tips, and branches facing the sun sprout again, so the trees slowly reshape themselves to follow the light. A breeze runs up through them, stronger in the twigs than in the trunk, and a few twig ends carry red buds.
Pixels and Filters
The sheet painted with the player's own bitmaps, blurs, blend modes and displacement.
39 overprint
Three see-through inks, a red, a grey and a pale grey, printed one over another on the same sheet. No ink is dark by itself: every dark patch is where two or three overlap, the way coloured cellophane darkens where it crosses. The three printings never quite line up, each slipping and turning by a hair, so thin rims of pure colour show along the edges and keep changing. The targets in the corners and the swatches along the foot show each ink, each pair and all three.
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
Four clouds of dust in a row, built up grain by grain over four minutes. Hundreds of dots are thrown around the page by one small rule, and where they keep landing a shape gathers, like a figure appearing in a long exposure. Between each shape and the next I nudge one setting a little, so reading left to right you watch one form turn slowly into another. The red flecks follow whichever dot has strayed furthest out.
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, about eight across and five down, packed so they touch. What matters is inside each: some are plain, some carry a ring of another colour, most hold a smaller disc anywhere from a speck to one that nearly fills it, and a few go three deep with a dot at the centre. A handful are only a ring, with bare paper showing. Each version deals fresh inks and a fresh character, so one block is nearly all plain with three surprises and the next is busy in every cell. The strongest colour is spent on two or three small things, 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.