David Gladstein: FF-

Artist(s):

• David Gladstein

Title:

FF-

Exhibition:

• SIGGRAPH 2008: Slow Art

Creation Year:

2008

Category:

• Animation & Video

Artist Statement:

This animation was a happy accident. I was interested in seeing what kinds of shapes could be generated by simple L-systems, so I coded a Python/PyQt application to iterate the replacement rule and draw the resulting string using the typical turtle geometry interpretation. I quickly saw that changing the angle parameter about a degree could produce very different shapes, and that haphazard exploration of the angle parameter might miss interesting shapes. So I added an animation feature to vary the angle systematically and save out the resulting frames. By trial and error, I settled on .01 degree as an increment that produced a small but noticeable change in the picture. I rendered the 18,000 frames into a movie for review and was surprised to find that at 30 frames per second the animation was interesting and fun to watch for 10 minutes, and that the eye could easily pick out single-frame shapes that differed substantially from the neighboring frames.