Complexity-based Systems Project Brainstorming

Thought dump

Interests:

• An art installation that exhibits hysteresis; each user visits it in the discrete state the last user left it but no one user is aware of how it got there.
• The visual quality of strange attractors
• A project that does more than literally visualize some aspect of complexity

Ideas:

• A "tunnel fly-through" that is following the path of a strange attractor or doubled pendulum. (it'd be slow, don't want to make people nauseous)
  The environment might also be driven by chaos, or by parametrizing whatever state space the attractors are in.

 

          https://www.shadertoy.com/view/XdXGD4

• A "duelling calculators"-esque visualization. Example: two adjacent squares are separated by a solid line. The squares are arbitrarily assigned a seed value. This value is the same for both but could even vary by the slightest magnitude. These values may map to different attributes, say, the colour of the square.
  As the program goes on, the value evolves chaotically. When the values diverge more than a set tolerance, subdivide the squares and pick one of the colours as the new seed. Repeat. Chaos ensues.

Eventually this would probably end up looking like noise, but phases and patterns might emerge

It might be cool to allow users to draw across to set rows and columns, or to touch individual squares sequentially to reset the colors.