wednesday, january 23, 2008
The aesthetics of squiggles
I downloaded these images in October 2001 from The Wallpaper Machine (you have to highlight the text since it doesn’t work anymore), by Roy Williams and Bruce Sears:
The Wallpaper Machine was a magical combination of nerdiness (reaction-diffusion systems) and more nerdiness (web 1.0 graphical tiled backgrounds). I had no idea how it worked, but I liked how the tiles looked and used them as backgrounds for the first version of something that eventually turned into this website. Now I’m a little older and can read more about reaction-diffusion systems for context even though I still don’t understand much:
Suprisingly complex structures arise out of very simple equations — that is the essence of Alan Turing’s idea. ¶ In this case the equations have been solved on a torus, which means you could use this or one of the many other examples of evolution for tiling the screen on a Web page.
This is a related image from Roy Williams that is pretty in its bright scientific way:
In the middle of the mathy Wikipedia article, there’s another eye-catching group:
And these patterns are found in birds and fish.
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