circles emerging from the void of gridspace
The monteSquares project is now available for collection on OBJKT.com.
monteSquares are a project I initially began as a kind of game for one of my colleagues and friends who had been supportive of my foray into generative art but hadn’t really done much of it himself. My colleague, nick-named Monty (or “Montë”, if you really play on his name), is a fan of circles and often uses them to fill the time (and the page) while I droll on about boring work-stuff. He had the good sense to ask me for an example of the work I was doing on a day when I’d made a pretty accidental “fork” in another project I was working on.
That evening I was working on another plotting algorithm and started playing with ellipse() to block out what I was doing when I made a mistake. Instead of calling the function to pack circles evenly, I let Processing place them at random. The result looked promising, so I filed that away for later.
On a weekend morning months later I thought of creating a simple grid-paper, compass, and dice “game” to generate a few shapes on a grid. Circles were the most logical place to start, and I wanted to improve upon the mistake I had made before.
(shape: circle, shapes: 7, nesteds: 1, nested style: outline, bullseyes: 1)
Using my pencil and dice game, I realized I would need to add a few quick rules and play with dimensions and settings to have this “game” create fun circle layouts. (I quickly suspended any ambition to do multiple types of shapes this go around.) The above image was the first/only draft I did on paper before I got excited and started in on the algorithm.
I had the opportunity to learn a lot of different technical elements of creative coding. Different challenges arose at different times. Frustrating: I hadn’t planned or prepared monteSquares for listing as an NFT. It took me about three months to refactor my code and methods to better capture the various chance-driven design elements in a way that I could store the information fore loading to the blockchain. Most frustrating: loading 500 pieces to the Tezos blockchain via OBJKT (instead of writing my own contract to do it). I learned a LOT about automating my computer’s UI and browser functions. But I probably could have broken even on the time it took to manually upload these individual pieces versus just learning how to write a custom minting contract.
All told, creating monteSquares has been a great learning experience, both in the generative space and the NFT space. The project description is below. Thank you!
Project Description
The monteSquares project is now available for collection on OBJKT.com.
monteSquares celebrates the most efficient shape in the universe, the ellipse. A fundamental building block of the generative space, the ellipse becomes the main character of the project. monteSquares is an algorithm that plots circles on random points of a 15×15 grid of void space.
Circle colors are chosen from a set of bold primary colors but have a chance of being generated from a random hue. One to eleven circles are layered on top of each other. The process creates effects evocative of paint splatters, celestial bodies, and compound shapes. When the algorithm detects that it has layered smaller same-colored circles inside larger ones, those circles have the chance of being styled and colored differently from their siblings.
The combination of colors, count, and placement results in a series of scenes ranging from chaotic to dramatic. The simplest things are born of complexity. monteSquares are the product of an algorithm written in Processing and is named after a colleague of mine who has been particularly supportive of my generative artwork adventure. The images have been generated as large SVGs to simplify scaling, printing, and other creative endeavors in the future.
Thank you for enjoying this project.
mirkGenerative
