Hank Guss

'Coral' was my first major project and I've gone back to it many times since it's initial instantiation. This is a cellular automaton that has a list of pixels it has visited and a list of all neighboring pixels, and it iteratively visits the one with the highest (randomly assigned) value. When visiting a pixel, colour is mutated from the average of all visited neighbors. In this version, I allow the growth structure to 'forget' about previously visited areas, rediscover and draw over them - the overlapping provides a much better sense of depth. This is aided by a global reduction in brightness each iteration, leaving the older growth dark in the background, and new foreground growth vibrant.

This piece is in essence a line drawing where colour is mutated rather than height, and can both increase and decrease. Every row is a slight mutation of the last, so any large change in colour stays visible for many rows - creating the illusion of vertical lines. There is also a blue effect operated on each row before mutating it, which allows mutation in colour to travel from side to side, letting the strands move diagonally and making the whole image a bit diffuse.