Joe Rule

The winter semester certainly has started off with a bang. I’m only taking 15 credits this semester, but it feels more like 20. The Electronic Imaging Seminar class that I’m taking is very challenging. We have new project every week for the first 6 weeks of class. This first one was made in an entirely new piece of software called Context Free. Basically, it’s a program that can generate circles, squares and triangles. You can then duplicate and modify the generated shapes using a basic programming language. When one attempts to combine math and imagery, the results are difficult to control. I ended up taking one of the example pieces on Contextfree.com and picking apart the code to figure out how it works. Both of these images are the same basic equation. The ‘black hole’ generates a spiral of circles of slowly varying hue. The circles scale down slightly for every one generated. So, after about an hour of calculating, we end up with about 500,000,000 tiny circles and a beautiful image.

startshape M
CF::Background = [ b -1 ]
shape M{
SHAPE1[]
loop 20 [scale 1.1 .13]
M [rotate 90..85 x 90 scale 1 .99 hue .3 brightness .03]
}
shape SHAPE1{
CIRCLE[brightness .5 hue 216 scale .5 saturation .6]
}

The ‘spider web’ image is the same basic spiral equation except that the circles are stretched to create the long, thin strands. There are much fewer shapes in this image, about 7 million.

startshape MASTER
CF::Background = [ b -1 ]
CF::Tile = [s 4 4]
shape MASTER{
loop 5 [rotate 130]
WING[]
}
shape WING{
loop 5 [scale 1.7 .1]
WING[x 1 y 1 scale 1 .8 rotate 200 brightness .02]
DOT[] }
shape DOT{
CIRCLE[]
}