Purpose
Gathering my thoughts from the original presentation, I thought about what attracted me to the idea and explore my original motives. From the beginning I've been very interested in this idea of empowerment and exploration, particularly teaching people to learn and explore complex phenomena that they believe or have been led to believe they aren't smart enough to understand. There's this stunning side of the natural world that's so difficult for many (myself included) to grasp until its visual, and I think that's what this project is really about.
It's about playing with chaos (oh the puns).
Play
One of the most epiphanic experiences of my undergraduate studies was the discourse Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman present in Rules of Play about the subtle differences between "games" and "play".
I think that's why I was so reluctant to let this project become a game (besides the fact I don't like the idea of being the carny) is because it's not a game to me, it's so much less structured.
The user interaction felt tacked on because it was; the way I presented it, it wasn't the objective of the piece, much less a supporting element. But I think it should be the objective, it should be the primary interaction of my audience, first to look, then to play.
No gradual subdivision
In this context, I don't think the progressive subdivision makes sense. I don't think having only two blocks makes sense either. I think it needs a reasonably subdivided array of same-colored squares to start. Pop open MS Paint, there you go:
Over time, I imagine it would shift colors ever so slightly, maybe like this:
Gross, I know, I'll fix the colors later. Obviously each block would also be a solid color. Maybe I should have done this in Illustrator... this is faster.
From there, I'm not really sure what will happen. I think that's largely dependent on the chaotic algorithm I use, but the end result should be fairly noisy regardless, so I think that's kind of just what I find aesthetic.
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