I can't resist pointing out that tiny green period in the otherwise black strip in the upper third. This is the tip of a shooting meteor star of length 1. In case you missed it.
Probably best to just spend some time staring at both images for a while before reading any of what I will be writing below. Like the folks over at Imagine Designs, we like to build and describe, sometimes concurrently, sometimes sequentially.
The painting by the same name obviously was named "Structure and Chaos" because it contains elements of both. The screenshot and the cartoon above (the Zits one, not the others (which are really excellent too!)) obviously share some things in common.
I love the Zits cartoon. The minute I spotted it I was hooked. I tried (pretty much in vain) to actually dissect the words in the "word bubbles" and you might enjoy doing the same. A few stand out: "Facebook" is all over the place and there are a few more. The main idea I get (you may get another) is that so often reality passes us by like it's doing for the guy for whom what the girls are taking about is random noise. I expect he and you get some vague sense of what they're taking about. The poor guy has to shake the letters out of his hair!
The screenshot is one moment during the running of meteor.tc, a tiny-c program that shoots "meteors" across your screen. The random letters in blue are wiped out if one of the meteors hits them. The code that drives the meteors is quite interesting, highly "structured," highly "chaotic." I tried to take a movie of it running but it doesn't do it justice so I'll be building an "animated graphic," not unlike the one I did of the "bugs" program you may recall I posted some time back.
Getting this program to work "perfectly," (is there such a thing?) took hours and hours. Here are some of the things I dwelled on:
1. how make the meteors randomly colored
2. how make their lengths and their directions random
3. how make it so the program behaves differently each time you run it
4. how guarantee the entire screen gets filled with random characters before the stars start shooting
5. if I tell it to populate the screen with 15003 "fixed" stars and then tell it to shoot 15003 meteor stars, will this be enough shooting stars to wipe out all the fixed stars? If so, how much longer will the shooting stars shoot before you've exhausted the shooting stars?
6. yada yada (is my black bubble cloud passing you by?!)
Everyone is turned on by different things. Pursue your thing. Try to understand the structure in the chaos going on around you.
Here's the code:
Here's the animation:
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| Meteor Shower |
I didn't translate this into Toby Speak. That would probably have added just enough chaos to this post to make it a black bubble cloud with almost all the white space filled in with black. I think they call that a black hole.
TcT
3 comments:
Zen Mastah Tobee sayz dat structure and chaos in da saym element iz vewy Zen. Id iz alzo lyke kwantum mechanicks, wid itz theories dat r zo strange butz ztill hav rewellz dat wuk. Zo yur prograym iz totallee in Tobee'z sphere ov understanding.
Amee sayz dat high school girls nevah reelee chainj, zins zhe AND awl ov er high school frends nuhow hang owd togetha...awn Facebook!
my mind (a virtual black hole some days) imploded on that one!
I just had an interesting thought after reading about your (very structured) program that fires meteors at letters in a variety of chosen ways. It does seem to depict a scene similar to the cartoon. The "hope" is that in both cases, we might be able to eliminate or remove the complex details so that we can once again see the simple nature of all things. Maybe in Nirvana we can see everything all at one moment with no feeling of disturbance. Tobee might be able to shed light on this experience.
Your shooting meteor animation reminded me of the Perseid meteor shower in mid- August. They shoot out randomly from one "point" like radiating spokes on a wheel in the night sky. The point "moves" each of the three nights of the display because WE (randomly?) move relative to that point of impact area in the upper atmosphere. But it's cool how we ourselves (the observer) become like the guy in the cartoon AFTER he has shaken the letters out of his hair. We are captivated by the simple beauty of a streaming meteor with its glowing trail without ever knowing when it or the next meteor will come. Our minds become still and quiet and things like fixing the car transmission that may have failed three days ago is a "long-forgotton" memory.
Reality seems infinitely complex, but looking at it as a collection of single "points" seems to make the chaos more structurally manageable.
Boy, I hope I didn't bore or lose anyone on that one! I think we need to fire a meteor program at this philosophical collection of words -- which are composed of letters! Maybe the word REALITY will remain in the end.
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