Final Project Presentation

concept

Conceptually, the work "Playing with Chaos" explores visual representations of chaos for their aesthetic properties and structure. The work intends to inform its audience about the nature of chaos by portraying systems that expose the "unpredictable, but not quite random" nature of chaos

This work will (more than likely) be ultimately represented as either a real-time or static loop projected onto a gallery wall. Though touch/mobile aspects were previously explored (and the code-base for such still retained) no plans are in place for exhibiting the piece with these capabilities active.

aesthetic

A myriad of visual color palettes have been explored for the work, though currently, it appears that color modulation and a 1:1 mapping between the period of the chaotic input and the "period" of each box's hue within the HSV colorspace has produced the best compromise of visual interest without sacrificing or disingenuously representing the underlying chaotic system.

The LAB/HCL colorspace is also currently being explored to see the effects of holding the luminance, rather than "brightness" of each square more constant, though presentations of those results have been received less positively.

technical

The work utilizes a logistic map to generate a function which is chaotic across its entire period, an important matter when attempting to map directly from the chaotic value space to the visual color space. The sketch is developed in Processing with snippets of R used to generate some of the color palettes, and can run in real time. 

The system can now also be pre-rolled to a certain iteration, which opens the possibility for more interesting tests and experimentations

future work (for the show!)

Now that the framework has been sufficiently established and can run and be captured as video stream, I intend to:

• test 2-dimensional chaotic systems 
• continue to research alternative color palettes
• allow the system to loop back to its initial state
• explore realtime switching between any successful alternative visualizations