In response to the theme of Forces, I produced a series of repeating patterns with a Processing sketch that saved its output every time the program was run.
When starting this week’s exercise, I created a design system for myself out of a series of constraints chosen from the collaborative list made in class. My chosen constraints were 1) I could only use primitive shapes, 2) I had to make a pattern using those shapes, and 3) my colour palette was limited to 5 colours, and I could only use colours with maximum vibrance/saturation values. An additional constraint was that I could only use one software, which was my plan anyway. Jumping into Processing, I quickly wrote a sketch that would break up the screen into a grid, and draw *something* into every section of the grid, in sequence from left to right, top to bottom. I then played around with what was drawn in each grid segment, playing around with colours, shapes and sizes, using a combination of randomly assigned and hand coded values, to see what different outputs I could achieve..
My work this week was inspired by artist Sol Lewitt’s Drawing Instructions (a selection of which can be seen here), which were sets of instructions on how to create wall drawings, that were sent out to galleries, who's workers had to follow the instructions and apply them to the physical space of the gallery, meaning every instance of any particularly Drawing Instruction was a unique interpretation. In writing the code for my Processing sketch, I left room for randomisation, so each time the computer ran the code it would interpret it slightly differently, and produce a unique outcome, in line with the constraints I had set out.
