CC Lab - FA2020

# LINK to the work:

https://www.katevassgalerie.com/game-of-life-emergence-in-generative-art-1

There are several versions of “Game of Life” introduced in this website.

“Game of Life” was a game initially generated by the mathematician John Horton Conway in 1970. It very much inspired Generative Artists, who therefore have created different versions of it. The original work as well as the Generative Art works is already introduced on this website, among which I’d like to elaborate more about the one done by Alexander Reben, that is, puritan_commuion.

First

  Later

  After

#AESTHETIC

Compared with Conway’s original version, puritan_commuion uses different colors to express his understanding of the mechanism of Game of Life, changing from purely black-and-white to gorgeous colors including yellow, red, and purple.

# ARTISTIC

Cells boom into yellow whenever you click the start button for the very first time. It keeps booming with yellow turning into red, purple, giving people a sense of “flowers blooming in a garden”. Despite the irreversible process of colors changing into black, through the colors we can indeed feel a sense of vitality, specifically in contrast with the black-and-white version, which somehow responds to the topic, Game of LIFE.

# METHODS or TECHNOLOGY

As is introduced on the website, Conway’s original work uses four “simple” rules (as follows) to create such complicated visual patterns:

1. Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbors dies, as if caused by underpopulation.
2. Any live cell with two or three live neighbors lives on to the next generation.
3. Any live cell with more than three live neighbors dies, as if by overpopulation.
4. Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbors becomes a live cell, as if by reproduction.

As for Reben, he actually follows a new rule, changing the colors of the squares over time instead of just using black and white. Also the coding is actually demonstrated on the website. Though not being able to fully understand the coding about how it works, from the experience of p5.js I can more or less see that some seemingly complicated works might just follow a system of tricky yet not that complex coding (at least not that long). Hope that I would be able to make something at least seemingly cool before too long:D

Photograph:

Hand-drawn Sketch:

Screenshot of p5.js sketch:

Link to p5.js code:

https://editor.p5js.org/tj1059/sketches/AQWnXplvX

Reflections:

– What are some ways (if any) that drawing on a piece of paper was easier than writing the program?

Changes are easier to make when using pens to draw on a piece of paper, while tiny adjustments in coding require much more work. Specifically, there are settled coordinate axes, therefore every dot has its own location needed to be precisely assigned in coding. Also compared with using pens, it is not that convenient to make details through coding.

– What are some ways (if any) that writing the program was easier than drawing on the piece of paper?”

Geometric patterns are clearer and easier to make through coding, especially when we need to make some similar things (e.g. vases) or regular patterns. 

– Problems you ran into: what was the symptom, what turned out to be the cause, what did you do to try to figure this out? What sources of help did you use? What would you do it differently next time?

One of the problems I run into was to make tiny adjustments in the coordinates of each item. Since my sketch includes many detailed items, the process of drawing turned to be much harder than simply drawing on a piece of paper, therefore cost me a lot of time. Nevertheless, in such process, I found “//” quite helpful since I can first double slash one line first, later try another version with tiny differences, and then remove the slash marks to recover the first try. Besides, after reading the assigned texts, I found that I could actually set variables (such as the size of the item) to avoid some repeated changes (e.g: the location). Therefore next time I’ll try to use more variables both stored in p5.js and assigned by myself to simplify the coding.