Month: May 2022

Here are multiple overlapping horizontal waves with slightly different frequency, amplitude, and phase. (Meaning they do not neatly line up.)

My code had a bug, and I spend way too much time hunting it down. In the process I generated many images trying to isolate the problem.

Actually there were two problems. One was an actual bug, the other probably should be called a prototype. I had an idea of what I wanted, wrote some code that I thought might work, but I was not sure. So I tried it to see what would happen. The result was close to, but not quite what I intended.

I spent a little more time on this one. Merging two variations, at two different scales, of the random/not-random algorithm, creating a foreground and background dichotomy.

This one, and the next two use the same “random pattern”, but with differences in color, contrast, and detail level.

Currently my goal is not a finished product. It is just to explore the space. This one uses similar colors as the previous, but lacks the fine details. Again, depending on your mood and how close you look, you might see wall paper, or you might see white noise, or anything in-between. Although, I may be more obsessed with finding patterns than most people.

Anyway, I imagine that someday I will find a way to use these, with much reduced contrast, as background, and then put something to serve as a focal point in the foreground.

No words today.

At one extreme you have the repeating pattern in wall paper, at the other extreme there is the total randomness of white noise. Both extremes are boring. (Although, back in the day, you could tune your television to a frequency between broadcast stations and enjoy a hypnotic and continuously morphing display of white noise.)

There is a lot of room between those two extremes, here are I few I feel are close to the middle.

The marble or wood grain surfaces initially seem uniform. But then under scrutiny one sees a random pattern. I am fascinated by that boundary between random and not-random. I have explored that space this several times in this blog, and will do it again.

Nature abounds with good examples. I am not trying to reproduce nature per se, but rather the abstraction of an interplay between random and not random.