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Week 1 - Nature is Chaos

For the first week of the class it felt fitting for nature to be about randomness, and how randomness can emulate motion. For the project, at first I thought about creating a system to emulate slime mold since the fungi has been used to create mechanical systems (like Tokyo's subway).

After thinking on the project for an evening, I decideed to change course and attempt to use randomness on an area I know well: cartographic maps

I wanted to experiment to see if a randomwalker could be used to create a generative topographic and a trail through the speculative mountain range.

In the end I was happy with how the piece turned out. With more time (and understanding of object boundaries and organic shapes). I broke the project down into incremental parts:

  1. Drawing organic shapes (as mountain peaks) that would not overlap
  2. Randomly setting starting and ending points for the trail
  3. Drawing a random noise path from the starting point
  4. Re-learning geometry and drawing a slop between the start and end
  5. Incorporating guided randomness to add variability to the slope
Originally I wanted to have the trail avoid and move around mountain peaks, but after thinking, many of my most favorite trails pass across peaks so I left kepy the functionality as it is. With more time I would like to add more variability and curves to the trail. At the moment is still feels very straight.

Initial sketches of mountain peaks

Progress from the initial mountain peaks to the final generative map