The idea for this Genuary program came from an art gallery opening I went to at Gallery 1313 in Toronto. At the opening I saw a painting called “WHOAM” by Paige MacLauchlin. The painting has a horizontal strip of coloured boxes running across the middle. This strip gives off the impression of being large pixels. I wondered how I could recreate a similar effect in Processing for this Genuary’s Day 4 prompt, “Pixels”.
I decided to make my program interactive rather than try to build something that programatically generated lines in ‘interesting’ ways. Sometimes it is easier to build-in interaction than craft a pleasing algorithm.
The program works by clicking and dragging lines across the image. The longer the line, the larger the ‘pixel’ boxes created along the line. This gives you a way to both cover large swathes with colour and add smaller details too.
I chose portraits as the base images because of the original inspiration from WHOAM.
The code for this program is available on my GitHub, link in bio…
Genuary 2024 — sspboyd.ca - Data Visualization & Generative Art
