Evanescencia

Time is like a furtive acid. It quietly dissolves objects, lives, and memories. Every novelty is already old, every meeting already a goodbye. Everything around us is flowing away — even if, fixated on permanence, anxious to hold on, we choose not to notice.

Evanescencia tries to capture through a digital procedure the feeling of things passing and fading by setting in motion a two-step algorithmic process. First, a structured particle system is used to draw a representational image of a flower, but it remains hidden from view. Instead, the color values from this source image are translated into forces that guide the movements for a swarm of drawing agents. As they drift around this flow field, a nebulous picture is gradually built up on the screen by the traces of color they leave in their wake, each of them a fuzzy aggregate of thousands of tiny lines.

The flower, thus, remains an elusive presence: it is generated behind the scenes, and immediately deconstructed in a way that brings it to the border of abstraction. It becomes, not a representation of something beautiful, but an immaterial force. It is the invisible source of a painting, as if sketched from a distant memory or from vague imagination.

Press
[s] to download image capture.
[2-9] to redraw and save an upscaled image (the numbers correspond to a multiple of the base 800 x 1000 pixel resolution).
[SPACE] to pause/unpause animation.

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