process

I took a quick wander through the neighborhood between classes last week, and ended up at Walt Whitman Park just between rain showers. The hexagonal pavers were drying in this really interesting way: different patches of the path were drying at different rates, but each individual paver was also drying in exactly the same way, from the center to the edges.

A pattern, you say? With predictable, consistently-scaled outcomes?? :)

Main inspiration image

A wider view of the overall pattern

Some beautiful industrial color from the same walk! Saving here for future projects

coolors.co palette, link for full size

I’m so fascinated by how much time and effort is needed to code relationships and processes that just happen all the time in the world around us — and that the logic we are so painstakingly naming and breaking and fixing in class is happening in these real-world situations as well (cf. Mimi continually calling us back to our bodies + actual senses in class when we put too much faith in our reasoning alone and start floating away from the question entirely)! Our bodies know so much — we know the logic, even when we don’t know how to articulate it (with or without a computer expecting very precise instructions on the other side). It’s as much charming as it is challenging, these little kind of math poems we’re typing up to describe why + how so that the computer is able to help us get to the what we are intuitively reaching for.

(Also, could not help but laugh that my first thought was to wonder if the rain’s interaction with the ground could be considered decoupled, and exactly when a counter for the drying process actually having begun would kick in for any one paver 😂)

step by step

(Geometry is hard!!)

project

I didn’t end up playing with fill after all this week, and instead focused on visibility/invisibility with the mouse interaction. It was so fun to dissect such a concrete (lol) example in such an abstract way!

Challenges this week:

• really internalizing interdependencies of for() loops and if() statements
  • SUPER helpful to just Google other people’s p5 sketches and comb through what they’d done whenever I hit a conceptual wall; actually poking around in their code really helped solidify some of the more abstract pieces of this week’s focus
• understanding where/how to initialize variables when using/affecting them in multiple functions
  • Don’t feel 100% confident on this yet, but starting to build the intuition — was cool to run into old problems this week but now have new ways of investigating them!
• not breaking my computer!! Though feeling pretty good I only had to force shut down once — and that my for() loop in that instance was technically stable, I had just made the area of effect too big and complex for my ancient lil laptop to handle.

https://editor.p5js.org/dkitp/sketches/uCMJ8G2TT