One of my original flocking sims featured birds flying around in a 3D environment. I took the easy way out and ignored any collision detection. The birds were pushed about by a combination of gravitational attraction (to keep them fairly centered on the screen) and Perlin noise (to give the illusion that the birds were moving around in a fairly organic manner). The follow-up to that version introduced an extra force in the form of magnetic repulsion. This gave me collision avoidance but it was not very graceful.

The Ian Couzin presentation, featured on the WNYC RadioLab blog, presented the problem of flocking in a beautifully simple 3 rule system.

1) Don’t get too crowded.
2) Don’t get too isolated.
3) Swim with neighbors.

(An optional 4th rule is that you should do what it takes to flee predators)

This is a bit of an oversimplification of what Professor Couzin outlined but it gives a nice insight into the simplicity of these complex-looking systems. Based on these three rules, I pretty much had the first two down. The repulsive force kept the fish/birds from getting too crowded. The attractive force kept the fish/birds from getting too isolated. But I never paid much attention the rule 3 which is why my early studies often looked like chaotic writhing balls instead of what is experienced in nature.

The code is pretty straightforward. Find the distance between me and each one of my neighbors. If this distance is really large, move towards the neighbor. If this distance is really low, move away from the neighbor. If the distance is neither too close nor too far, then allow my velocity to become influenced by the neighbor. The amount of influence each fish has on each other is a curve. If the threshold of attraction is a distance of 50, then a distance of 51 would involve a minimum of influence compared to a distance of 200 which would be a stronger influence. I should probably limit this distance so that a fish 5000 units away would have no influence at all, but I need to do more research to see what is being observed in nature.

Future versions of this project will incorporate the dynamically resizing zones, as mentioned in the Ian Couzin presentation. For now, the zone thresholds are hardcoded. Also, there is no sense of leadership (though I don’t know if such a thing exists in the real world equivalent) and each fish is being influenced by every other fish in the simulation (which is probably not how these things actually work). What I will likely try next is to have each fish only being influenced by its 7 or so nearest neighbors.

Here is a video of the simulation. This version features 2500 fish and 2 predators. It runs in real-time.

This version uses 25000 fish and 2 predators and does not run in real-time.

The project went through many different looks. My original idea was to try to make the gravitational and orbital forces mold the digits out of a sea of particles. The initial studies were pretty positive but the leading ‘1′ digit was proving to be problematic. The ‘8′ and ‘0′ were fine because they were simple forms made of circles. Spinning an attractive force did a good job of creating the rounder digits but I was struggling with the ‘1′.

I went with an entirely different approach (which was eventually rejected) for a while. I created gravitation depressions where the digits forms were and flooded the scene with force particles. The forces repulsed each other but were drawn into the digits and spread out to create the 18.08. I then flooded the scene with particles and let them do what the forces instructed, much like in the Addition Subtraction project. I was rather fond of the result but it deviated from the original inspiration too much so we ended up going back to the original idea.

I ended up turning the ‘1′ into the particle emitter. It made the most sense to do it this way. Even though I was bothered a bit by segregating the digit from the other three, the end result came out nicely. A glowing series of particle emitters aligns to form the ‘1′ and as the particles spread across the screen, they are pulled and pushed into whirling black holes which end up forming the other three digits (and the decimal).

Final print piece.

Early test render. Audio by Tim Stutts.

Final render. Audio by Tim Stutts.

For this project, I created black and white landscapes that can be explored through keyboard input. Some of the landscapes are simple expansive horizons, others are complex layered caverns. Some of them are static, others morph as the camera comes near.

And somehow, through the alcohol haze, they managed to put together a really nice interview for Juxtapoz Magazine that spans 12 glossy pages. So to them, I say Thank You.

Aside from the near all-cover set, the other curious thing about this tour is he performed without the aid of drums or guitar. It is him, a conductor, and a backing orchestra.

Photograph by Robert Sinclair.

I was assigned the cover of Radiohead’s ‘Street Spirit’. And I had a little over two weeks. Because the short deadline, I decided to do something with reaction diffusion. I love reaction diffusion. RD is my new additive blending. You are probably familiar with RD from the amazing 3D type piece by Karsten Schmidt (Toxi).

Since PG was performing with an orchestra, who rehearses to a click track, I was able to get a recording of the song more or less as it would be played live. This allowed me to code in a few tone changes and transitions manually so the piece would have some relevance and variety throughout the length of the song.

Photograph by York Tillyer.

While PG sings, an ominous and slightly off-putting reaction diffusion pattern spreads and pulses across the background. When he reaches the climax of the song and the key changes to hope, the diffusion dissipates and is engulfed by a bright light.

Photograph by Robert Sinclair.

Many thanks to the Georgina Sinclair, Rob Sinclair, and Peter Gabriel.

I showed five different pieces, ranging from prints to sculpture to an interactive installation. All of the pieces were related to my exploration with magnetism and mathematical phenomena.

Selected Works
Made with Processing and Cinder (C++ framework).

One of the 46″ flat screen displays shows a 22 minute reel of some older video projects. Most are audio reactive. Included are a Magnetosphere rework, Fuji, Cymatic Fluid, Solar with Lyrics, Audio-reactive Landscape, Relentless, and Branching.

Moment of Fission, series of 6 prints
Made with Processing.

For this series, I placed anywhere from a dozen to a few hundred charged particles into a small space. All of the particles want desperately to push away from every other particle. A couple frames after they explode outward, I render out the results. The prints attempt to visualize the act of atomic fission.

Dodecahedral Variations

When I was planning content for the show, fellow GAFFTA alum Ryan Alexander suggested I add some sculptures to the show. In specific, the magnetic solid sculptures I have been making off and on over the last couple years.

These forms are created with cylinder magnets, spherical magnets, and ball bearings. Magnetism is the only thing holding the forms together. They are fairly fragile and picking them up will likely crush them. All of the forms I created were variations of the 12 sided dodecahedron. This particular platonic solid seems to be the form the magnets are happiest with.

The largest structure required a temporary scaffold of sorts. Without the scaffold, I would be unable to complete the form without it succumbing to gravity. This structure took me a few hours to create and on the day of the show, it collapsed on the way to the gallery. I ended up rebuilding it the day of the show.

Quantum Decoherence
Made in Cinder (C++ framework).

This pair of prints was made for 40″x30″ backlit lightboxes. While exploring ideas for the interactive piece, I started playing around with Gray-Scott reaction diffusion. The formulas for reaction diffusion are surprisingly easy but they can create a large variety of beautiful organic patterns which resemble many patterns found in nature.

The aesthetics are based on the results achieved with scanning tunneling microscopes. It is intended to be viewed as a visual interpretation of the wave-particle duality of light and matter. The individual nodes do not exist separately from each other. They are simply different densities of the same ether. They grow and turn white as a wave, emanating from the center, passes by.

Reactive Diffusion, interactive installation
Made in Cinder (C++ framework).

This installation shows off reaction diffusion in all its glory. A 46″ flat screen display shows a view of the webcam which is pointing at the viewer. It functions as a digital mirror, but the reflection is highly distorted. The entire screen is morphed by a reaction diffusion effect. The reaction flows across the screen and undulates in a intensely mesmerizing way.

Music by Helios (“Backlight” from the album Caesura)

When I created this project, it initially managed to eek out about 10 fps when running at full resolution. It ended up feeling really sluggish. I bought a nice tower PC but it still barely reached 15 fps. My mentor and collaborator, Andrew Bell, suggested I move everything to the GPU because the slowdown was likely due to the way I was abusing FBOs. The original version pulled data off the FBO, modified a large quad mesh, then sent the content to a GLSL shader which handled the lighting and coloring.

The rework now has everything running in GLSL shaders. The huge mesh grid is gone, replaced by just one single textured quad being drawn fullscreen. This brought the frame rate up to 60+ on both the PC tower and my MacBook Pro laptop.

For one week in early March, 2010, anyone taking an evening walk down the 400 block of High Road in Wembley, England, will find themselves under the watchful gaze of Overlord.

This project is entirely about mesmerism. It is my intention to cause passersby to stop and stare up at the 50 meter wall on which the Overlord appears. He stares down at them, surrounded in a swirling reaction-diffusion fluid. He appears indifferent and his facial expression does not change.

To create this project, I stared into a camera for 20 minutes. I used this saved video content as input into a reaction-diffusion project created in Cinder. The project runs beautifully in realtime but it made more sense for the end product to be a simple looping video.

The reaction-diffusion responds to the brightness of the pixels in the video as well as the motion from frame to frame. The motion creates ripples which propagate across the screen and influence the formation and destruction of the RD patterns.

Here is the venue.

View Larger Map

Short render from the longer piece. Sadly, Vimeo wasn’t too kind to the compression.

They asked me if I could make a real-time audio reactive version of Solar. I created Solar in 2007. It originally came about because I was working on a demo for a talk I was to give at UCLA. It quickly became one of my more popular works. It features a magnetism and gravity sandbox where particles react to the intensity of the audio. Creating a compelling real-time version is definitely a challenge. The original Solar render probably ran at about 0.5 to 1.0 frames per second. Getting that up to between 30 and 60 fps is not going to happen easily.

Thanks to some great advice from Andrew Bell, I was able to create a robust version that still had a nice visual density but would still run at a good clip. It involved using instances of the parent sphere and child particles instead of calculating a set of particle positions for each sphere. Since I was definitely CPU bound (the magnetic repulsion calculations can get really heavy really quickly), this turned out to be a great way to still show tens of thousands of particles but only need to do repulsion calculations on a set of a few hundred.

I did a render to some audio from an episode of Radiolab to show how it performs.

The reason the black oil appealed to me was that it allows you to visualize the invisible field surrounding magnets. Its like a three dimensional execution of the iron filings test but much more mesmerizing. I instantly wanted to know more about them. Why do they behave the way they do? Why are they spaced out just so? What insane amount of math is going on behind the scenes?

These questions eventually led me to the study of Cymatics. Below are my first studies for replicating cymatic phenomena using code.

The particle checks the pixel array to see what shade of grey it needs to represent. If it needs to show blackness, it grows smaller and its magnetic charge diminished accordingly. If it needs to represent white, it grows larger as does its charge. Once you throw a few tens of thousands of particles into the scene, eventually they spread out in an organically pleasing manner. There seems to be no patterning, but its certainly not a random spread.

I added an additional feature which allowed the particle to scale down small enough that it becomes invisible to the naked eye. I then allowed adjacent particles to stretch a thin black line between them if their distance is short enough. I changed the background color to grey so that the particles and lines could paint in the light and dark parts of the image.

A couple years ago, I asked my mother about the time we spent there. She laughed and said we had never gone to Mount Fuji. The memory I had was totally fabricated. We were actually in a public park just outside Tokyo. Mount Fuji was visible in the distance. It was not foggy. There was no bamboo. I had apparently made the whole thing up.

In this piece, Mount Fuji always remains far away but looms over the landscape. It is always partially obstructed by bamboo and mist and other weather effects. Sometimes you can only see it because it is silhouetted by the passing full moon. It is a moody piece running in black and white.

For this test render, I used some audio by the insanely talented Zoe Keating from the Ghostbird soundtrack.

This project went through several months of changes. Here is a selection of strange bugs and abandoned visions from early in the project’s lifespan.

If I am feeling really anxious or I just want to be distracted for a while, I play with the magnets.

Everything was going as planned. We were making great progress. Then it happened. Something entirely unanticipated. The more time we put into developing the app, the more it became respectable. Lo, our gutter-born brainchild was maturing! It sprouted wings of respectability and soared. The depths whence it came were now but a speck. It defied our intent and expectations and blossomed into something magical.

So, what does it do? What DOESN’T it do!

How many times have you longed to see the famous neo-classicist Jacques Louis David sing a scat rendition of Mouret’s Rondeau? If you are anything like me, the answer to that question is easily in the thousands. Well, my friends, long no more…

Most of the work I have done in the last month has involved creating suggested sample applications in the spirit of learning the ropes. Andrew Bell has been giving me assignments. First up, create a globe and map earthquake data onto it.

I had done something similar a while back in Processing but my data was limited to California and Nevada. Now I would be working with 7 days worth of data from all around the world for any earthquakes with a magnitude of 2.5 or higher. It isn’t a huge amount but I would have to find ways to deal with the clusters that are associated with any earthquake data visualization.

Creating the actual globe was great fun. I was pointed towards NASA’s Blue Marble project. There you can download Earth textures at astronomical sizes. Some are available at 86400×43200 pixels. I grabbed a color map and a height map. Using NormalMappr, I created an additional normal map from the height map.

The one drawback of the NASA data is the river systems aren’t as prominent as I would have liked. I ended up adding in the rivers and smaller lakes using this image as a source.

As I mentioned earlier, earthquakes come in clusters. The Dominican Republic had a few dozen 3.0M to 4.0M quakes in that week. If I just stuck pins exactly over the epicenter, all of the Dominican Republic pins would be reduced to a single blurry pin which would not give an accurate summary of the area.

I decided to go back to my old friend Magnetism. In order to keep the quakes grouped but individually distinct, I anchored the pin to the epicenter but allowed the other end to drift a short distance away. This distance would be determined by making each pin-head magnetic so that it pushes away its neighbors’ pin-heads.

7 Days of Earthquakes from flight404 on Vimeo.

Magnetism to the rescue, yet again. I gave each node along the snakes body its own magnetic force. Each node repels other nodes. It now is possible for a snake to tie itself in a knot, but it generally will not self-intersect.

Eventually, I stuck a couple dozen snakes in the water, attached their heads to each other, added a sine-based undulation force, and voila! Reasonably ugly jellyfish. They may be ugly, but they are audio responsive.

The nodes arrange themselves in space using magnetic repulsion. Any node can repulse other nodes as long as they are of an equal or higher generation. The node at the base of the trunk repels everything whereas the nodes at the branch tips repel only each other. If you code in some decreasing branch lengths and radii as you go from generation to generation, you will create a nice space-filling tree with no branch overlaps. Sadly, these trees are complex enough to elude a reasonable frame-rate but perhaps with some limitations placed on the number of branches that can be created, and killing off the repulsion after the branches settle into place, they will be swaying in the Perlin noise breeze in no time.

I then tried to place some leaves or flowers on the trees and accidentally changed the perceived scale quite a bit. It no longer seemed like a majestic oak. It turned into a bush, and then eventually, much smaller flowering weeds.

The project went through many different looks. The primary art direction we received was that the end result should be dark and should have some baroque sensibilities. We did our best to hit these goals and we are quite proud of the end result.

Learning Experience
For me, the most rewarding part of this job was that I learned a whole lot. Fellow Barbarian, Andrew Bell, showed me many interesting tricks, not to mention working his ass off to optimize this project so it would run at 30+ fps and also handling the port to C++ for the iTunes visualizer version.

The early versions had the primary tendrils rendered as flat strips that always orient themselves towards the camera so you never (well, almost never) see the strips from the side. This was my way of faking the viewer into believing they were seeing a solid mass. However, this method had its problems. It was impossible to texture map it in an interesting way, and occasionally, the strip would twist a full 360° which added unsightly kinks. Andrew suggested we move to actual tubes instead of strips and I thought he was nuts. The piece was already starting to drag down the framerate and he wanted to add more geometry?? Nuts, I tell ya!!

A couple days later, he showed me the new build. I was floored. Not only did he do what he promised, but he improved the frame-rate in the process AND he added support for shaders. Awesome!

BEFORE:

AFTER:

Suddenly, things got a lot more interesting… more lush. He ended up switching the tendril geometry over to VBOs (vertex buffer objects) which sped things up a great deal. He also pre-cached the texture coordinates because they didn’t actually change once the piece was up and running.

The Birds

The idea of flocking crows or ravens is very much in keeping with the Relentless aesthetic but there was some concern that we were simply repurposing a project we did with Nervo for Fox Movies. We decided to do away with everything we did for Nervo and start from scratch. The original Nervo piece relied on using 160 flat images of a 3D bird in flight. For the Relentless version, we switched over to actual 3D birds (admittedly quite rudimentary). Each bird was made up of 12 polygons. The wings actually flapped and they could be viewed from any angle (whereas the Nervo version worked best when the birds were viewed side-on.

The Background

From the beginning we were instructed to do away with the notion of an infinite black or white space. The entire scene should be filled with content and this proved to be quite the challenge. Originally, we just dropped the whole scene inside a large textured sphere but the end result was lacking. Andrew came up with the idea of using a flat plane as the background but by using some FBO trickery, he was able to make these beautiful flourished textures bleed into view. I still have no idea how he pulled it off but the effect is quite stunning. Later he added a dynamic light source to make the scene feel even more dark and slightly disturbing.

The (faked) Volumetric Lighting

After we settled on the look, we wanted to make it seem like the invisible center of the mass of tendrils was a hidden light source. Earlier versions actually had the tendrils glowing near their base but the look of shadow and silhouette was more intriguing so we killed the glow and added faked volumetric lighting. The light beams themselves behave as if they were magnetic particles. Each one is born, lives for a predetermined amount of time, then fades out and dies. While they are alive, they repulse each other if they get too close. This created a really nice organic movement which made it seem like the movement of the tendrils actually caused the light beams to form or disappear. Combined with the background lighting, the effect became quite engaging.

The Content Creation Tool
Erasmus wanted to be able to create renders from pre-recorded pieces of music so we tweaked the live version to accommodate the loading in of external audio as well as an XML file of adjustable variables. By modifying the XML file, they could run the application and customize their experience. Every graphic element could be toggled individually. So if you want a video with no background for compositing, or perhaps you want to leave the birds out, just tweak the XML and run the application. Additionally, since we were no longer confined to creating an experience that ran live in real-time, you could up the amount of objects as high as your memory will allow. This is how we made the following test render. The bird and particle count was turned up really high, as was the detail on the tendril geometry.

The following video is a test render from The REV content creation tool. Please note this is not an official Relentless video. This is simply a test render we did to make sure the audio responsiveness was as we liked it. The audio is by The Flashbulb (“Six Months Without Light” off the album Kirlian Selections) but be aware that The Flashbulb has no affiliation with Relentless. The chosen audio was simply a test track. I chose The Flashbulb because he is my favorite artist to audio visualize and I love this track.

Or you can view the much higher resolution Quicktime here. Note, it is around 300Mb.

The REV iTunes Version
As I mentioned above, there is a free downloadable version for iTunes. You can find out more at the Relentless Energy site. Have at it!

This is the process video…

…which created this image.

The second iteration involved recreating the Magnetosphere study and using those particles as the source of the ink.

Audio by The Flashbulb (“In an Instant” from the album “Red Extensions Of Me”)

In the summer of 2007, Nando Costa approached Barbarian Group and asked if we would help out with a project his new motion graphics company Nervo was working on for Fox Movies Japan. He showed us the boards and instantly we knew we wanted to collaborate because his vision for this project was quite beautiful and surreal.

What he needed from us was videos of flocking behavior. He had seen the previous experiments I have done with perlin noise flocking and thought it would work well for this project. All he wanted was a couple videos of flocking using a 3D crow (or is it a raven) he would provide. Simple enough. But given the tight deadline, the thought of doing a render and posting it and waiting for approval or changes and then implementing the changes then rerendering and reposting, etc… That process didn’t make sense for this project so we decided to deliver them an application instead.

Using Processing, we started playing around with the flocking behavior to make it more customizable. The original version of the flocking experiment had very few controls and they had to be hard-coded. There was no run-time adjustment. This was the first thing addressed. Several new parameters were added. They included population density, gravity, drag, collision avoidance, flight range, camera position and tracking, and a few toggles such as tethering strings, floor plane, and bezier curves. Once the parameters were tweaked to the user’s liking, they need only to hit the spacebar and an image sequence of PNGs would start saving to the harddrive.

Once he had the exported image sequence, it was pretty easy to put it into a post processing application and work his magic. See one of the final spots below. Or you can view them on the Nervo.tv website. The birds where used in the top three spots.

The focus of the talk for UCLA was to show how small steps can combine to form something engaging. I start by showing a single particle, then two particles, then many particles, then add an emitter which can create particles but can also morph into an attractor which pulls particles. Then you add a magnetic repulsive force, then an orbital force, then a gravitational force. Add a few visual tweaks and you can end up with something like this.

I liked the look quite a bit so after I finished the UCLA presentation, I came home and began to make it an audio visualizer. This was a pretty easy step. I just have each particle listen to specific frequencies of incoming audio. The amplitude of the frequency effects the mass and charge of the particle so as the audio gets louder, the particle gets larger and more pushy.

Aubrey, the Barbarian’s ex-CTO, and I thought it would be funny to set a webcam up on the roof to try and make the East Coast offices jealous of our view. We put the camera on the roof and ran the firewire cable down in through my office window. The camera was weather-proofed with a 2-liter soda bottle and was weighed down by a cast-iron skillet.

We decided to use Processing to intercept the webcam feed so that we could add content to each image before letting it go live. I took a still image from the webcam and cut it into several layers in Photoshop in order to create depth masks. I could then apply those masks to the live feed and composite graphics between the layers to give a greater sense of realism and depth. We could have added anything at that point. UFOs, giant kittens, Cher. We ended up going with explosions, smoke plumes, and a Godzilla walking back and forth, breathing fire.

Sadly, there is no documentation of this because we got sidetracked. Then we moved to a larger office and lost the awesome view. However, I ended up recreating the project at home using a camera on the roof of my apartment, sans Godzilla.

An 8×8 grid of powermates was hooked up to a single Mac G5 tower through a daisy-chain of 21 four-port USB hubs and 6 power strips. I now had a low-res (8 pixels by 8 pixels), low-color (256 shades of blue) monitor whose individual pixels were an input device for itself. Now what.

The first project made with the new Powermate grid was a noisy mess. Each powermate can be turned left or right and I used this input information to not only control the brightness, but also to control the frequency of a sine wave tone associated with that particular powermate. What you are left with is 64 overlapping sine wave tones which, combined with a nice set of speakers with a good subwoofer, can create a fairly intense wall of noise. Can range from incredibly annoying to incredibly soothing. Later versions included a series of scales which would allow the sound to take on particular flavors, such as American Jazz or Middle-Eastern. And with some assistance, a beat generator was added to give the sine wave tones a bit of rhythm.

Later, I was sitting around, staring at these devices, and wondering what I should make next. I picked one up and was turning the knob absent-mindedly, and it brought back memories of playing pong with paddles as a child. I made a game of pong. Not a particularly good one. Because of the low resolution of the display, even if you leave your paddle stationary, you still have nearly a 50% chance of returning the shot.

Here is the original image.

I set up an overnight render for a song by Trentemoller. When I awoke the next morning and viewed it for the first time, I was stunned. I watched it a couple more times and sent the link to Andrew Bell. His response, “Yeah, that’ll do well”.

The thing that is most interesting to me about the video is that it was nearly entire created with code. I say nearly because I use a couple premade particle images but every other aspect (aside from the music, of course) was made possible with code. And randomness. If I were to recompile the code over and over, the resulting videos would all be unique.

Here is the first video I made for a song by Trentemøller’s Miss You. Its 92MB so be patient.

Due to the success of this project, The Barbarian Group decided to turn Magnetosphere into an iTunes visualizer. Andrew Bell, the most patient person I know, had the horrible task of porting my bandaided Processing code into proper man-style C++ while remaining faithful to the original look. He did a splendid job and the Magnetosphere iTunes visualizer did quite well. It eventually went on to greater things.

Below are three prints I created for the OFFF 2007 Conference in Barcelona where I gave a talk about my creative process.

Several months after the initial Magnetosphere video, I revisited the Trentemøller piece. It has become my favorite audio visualization to date. It just works so well! No small thanks to the beauty of the song itself. Miss You is a classic for me because it is both FFT friendly (Fast Fourier Transform, the method by which I am analyzing the audio) and extremely soothing to listen to. I will forever associate this song with discovery.

I found pretty quickly that the particles, even when being dynamically modified with audio, really just want to find their place and stay put. There isn’t much activity. I remedied this problem by adding a rotation velocity.

Audio by Ganga (Autumn).

Audio by Goldfrapp (Deer Stop).

And finally, Turbulence with flares. I saved this one for last because it was the most successful of the video renders. Audio by Thievery Corporation (Le Monde).

Over the next few months, I continued to refine this code. I created a couple dozen renders of varying success. The following videos are some more successful from the bunch.

Audio by Ganga (Autumn).

My apologies, I do not remember who created this audio. I will credit it properly as soon as it comes to me.

Audio by Royksopp (“In Space” off Melody A.M.)

I definitely got carried away with the additive blending. It took a while for me to understand that moderation is useful when applying new effects. But for now, make it glow! Like the stars in the heavens above! Everything should glow!

The other reason I relied so heavily on additive blending is that it works as an easy way to get around the depth-sorting issue which plagues semi-transparent image rendering. In OpenGL, if you want to draw a bunch of transparent PNGs, you need to draw them from back to front. When you have a dynamic camera system and a bunch of objects, it can be tricky or time consuming figuring out which objects are behind and which are in front. If you use additive blending, you don’t need to worry about depth sorting.

Audio by Helios (Sons of Light and Darkness). Note, this piece builds really slow so don’t be put off by the very very dark intro.

The thinking was that I could charge a bunch of particles and let them dance about in a scene. Some would be small and fast, others would be massive and slow. They could play off each other, dance with each other, and ultimately create an endless display of randomness.

The magic spark occurred when I decided that the small particles should have a variable charge. I tried random numbers, sine wave curves, even Perlin noise. None of those felt quite right. Then I tried audio analysis.

Each particle’s charge would be dependent on the amplitude of a frequency to which it was assigned. Spark!

Below are some images from the early days of Magnetosphere. At this point, my understanding of OpenGL was extremely limited. I knew how to draw points and lines and not much else. So these early iterations have a simple aesthetic.

Here are a couple fairly low-res videos of Magnetosphere being projected in my living room. I am filming the projection so you can better see how it performs in realtime. The beat detection effects are done programmatically so I apologize in advance for the hyperactivity.

Audio by Cornelius (Tone Twilight Zone).

Audio by Deee-Lite (Groove is in the Heart).

Visit The Barbarian Group NextFest portfolio page to learn more about the process behind this project.

Audio by Bit Shifter (“Flight Risk”). Mastered by Chris Burke at Bong & Dern.
Originally released on Various Artists: Sonic Acts XI • The Anthology Of Computer Art DVD, 2005.

I came up with the concept of the video when I started playing around with feedback loops in Processing. First I would construct a large box that the whole scene exists inside of. Inside that box, I would place some objects. Finally, I take an image of the entire scene and use it as a texture map for the sides of the big box. I would repeat this process every frame and depending on the rotation of the box and the size of the objects, you can get some really nice glimpses of infinity. Below are a couple sample images I created for a presentation I gave at OFFF in Barcelona.