In 2021 we in a developed world are dependent on consuming digital information, this information, is usually communicated through social media and news platforms. The vast majority of visual information is created for three purposes; sharing, informing, and selling a product. Much of this information has proven to be damaging to humans in ways that are new, unregulated, and still not fully understood, think teenage mental health and the correlation to social media usage. Inspired by my love of nature and my frustration with malicious digital information I developed a collaborative instagram page that acts as a digital sanctuary for people to have a brief break. This is the process of creating this page.
Nature has hundreds of thousands of quirks, structures, emotions, and visuals. Nature is so incredibly diverse and complicated the only parallel I would compare it to is the complicated nature of human systems themselves. I hope to use the unique collaborative process only humans can capitalize on to create a digital sanctuary for people to enjoy.
Processing(p3) algorithm process
Inspired by the random beauty of nature and our surroundings I decided to use a Perlin noise flow map to manipulate the output of the image slightly to create a digital feel to the piece. I wrote a Processing script that takes an image input, scans and reads the image for color data and at random, in correspondence to a Perlin noise flow field, prints irregular ellipses with the purpose of recreating the image in a manipulated and digital manner.
The design process of this project focused on iterations and iterations, making incremental changes to the code to develop different shapes, styles, colors, etc. All with the purpose of conveying a different artistic style. I decided to settle on pointillism.
Pointillism appealed to me because of the similarities it has to pixels on a computer or digital screen. I wanted to manipulate the pieces to “match” the digital nature of the Instagram Page. The process of creating the algorithm was relatively simple. I took the three aspects incorporated and put them together, after tweaking the code to make sure it preformed properly I began creating the page and posting content.
Instagram page
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