Stochasticity #8 - Webcam

This stochastic poem takes the idea of random drawing, but with a sampled color. It take the webcam, and each time one of the “walkers” walks, it draws the color that it finds on the webcam.

Stochasticity #7 - Audio

This stochastic piece dives into some audio. The poem uses the new Web Audio specification for browsers. It’s still a fairly experimental feature in browsers, but it seems like it will be really powerful. This piece sounds best with some headphones. I’d love to continue to explore this intersection between programmatic visuals and audio. There are some issues in Firefox with crackling that I wasn’t able to sort out.

Stochasticity #6 - Weather Vectors

Another vector field poem, this simulation is starting to feel a lot like weather. The rules are similar to last time, but with more of the “walkers”. I find it fascinating how the lines of color converge together as time progresses, and then can randomly split apart. Theoretically if two “walkers” ended up on the exact same point, then they would be merged together forever. However, the location is stored in a double precision float.

Stochasticity #5 - Etch-A-Sketch

This poem is a little bit of a departure form the last ones. There is a vector field that spreads across the entire screen. Each vector is randomly pointed in a direction according to the simplex noise algorithm (comparable to Perlin noise). Essentially the algorithm takes into account 3 dimensions, with the third being time. What’s interesting about this is that the noise can be thought to be a 2d slice moving through 3d space. After…

Stochasticity #4 - Polar Blobs

I changed up the coordinate space and size of the random color “walkers” on this fourth version of the poem. I had to wrack my brains but I remembered polar coordinate space from my high school math class. The sizing difference creates an interesting effect I think.

Stochasticity #3 - Chasing

This third sketch is a variation on #2, but it adds a lot of personality to the random color “walkers”. They grow and multiply this time, again at a random rate. What is interesting about the growth was that I had to make it a linear growth instead of an exponential. The poem was not nearly as interesting with exponential growth because the “walkers” became too numerous too quickly to be visually appealing. The rule…

Stochasticity #2 - Moving Out

This variation on the previous poem changes the way that the probability of the random color “walkers” is portrayed. Instead of walking randomly up, down, left, and right, they walk randomly up, down, and right only. There is a fading a effect that helps visualize how the distribution changes over time. The color of the “walkers” continues to shift randomly as they move.

Stochasticity #1 - Random Walkers

I’ve started a new series of programming poems exploring the idea of stochasticity. What is stochasticity? It’s a fancy word for the process of random events. The opposite of a stochastic event is a deterministic event. Computers are inherently deterministic machines, but I’m interested in the stochastic process for visualization and processing. Heady stuff, right? Well I’m trying to make visually appealing pieces that let me explore these ideas so that I can have an…