Code 11: Weather for particles

A flow field is weather for particles. You lay a grid of small arrows over the screen, each one pointing wherever the noise says, then you drop things in and they go. They do not know where they are going. That November, neither did I.

The first one had a microphone. Not to steer anything; it shook the whole sky, so a loud room meant nervous weather and a quiet one meant the particles settling into their lanes like late traffic. I built it the way I paint, which is to say I did not understand my materials and used them anyway. There is a line in that old file I was sure did something, and it does nothing at all. The pictures were beautiful. That is the whole argument for starting before you understand.

Teaching it to listen

Most of the copies are the same field with a different ear on it. One leans toward the mouse. One leans toward a person, because I pointed a depth camera at my living room and stood in it. One only lets the wind blow inside the shape of letters, an idea borrowed from Amnon Owed's typography lessons, so the words look combed. And the big one, for a wall, where a friend at a mixer could push the weather around from across the room while I watched the particles flinch.

The version that played the festival is mostly knobs. Nobody in the room saw a knob. The arrows stayed the same for two years; more hands could reach them, that is all.

A body as weather

The camera copy is the one I still like. Where you stand, the particles part. When you move, they follow the edge of you like a tide going out. I never showed it to anyone. It lived in a folder with a few hundred frames of me waving at my own apartment. I finish most things nobody receives; it turns out that was the practice, and the shows were the excuse.

Where it is now

Everywhere, quietly. Every flock I have drawn since flies through a field it never shows. The lights for Spilt Milk ran on one. The boids on the homepage are pushed by one they cannot see, the way a person is pushed by a mood. Some things should stay hidden until asked.

The old files: processing-archive/flow-field. Next: the spare tyre I carried for two years without reading it.

Previously: ← Code 09: The flock that followed me home  ·  The first field, in the moment: Code 05